07/17/2024
I sat with these words. Wondering about the way they’ve sat heavy on shoulders. How they take up room where they are not welcome or invited. How they creep in, embedding themselves into the depths of our understanding of who we are.
What is spoken to us using spiritual speech can imprint in particularly powerful ways—for better or for worse. An encouragement or a curse. A balm or a blow. Of Jesus or of man.
What we may recognize in our adulthood as toxic or abusive, we may have only understood as God in adolescence. Meaning, how the church or church people harmed us because directly from God. His doing, his hope—that we would be crushed or maimed or broken down in anger and punishment.
And it might be, that the story of another brings this to light. That what we experienced may seem normal or godly, until we see kindness for the first time. Until we feel the warmth of the sun and know healing outside the walls we were barricaded behind. Until we gaze upon Jesus—in all his own torment and anxious nights and pain—it is then that we find hope, eyes that look upon us with warmth and whose arms extend toward us in love.
What’s something you were told that made you question if God loved you?
This was the question I asked and here on these slides are the responses I received. They are worthy of our grief, of our pause, of our attention. They, and things like them, are what I keep in mind each time I write and it’s why I started sharing my own story here in this space. And they are, what I hope, we too might look at and consider as we come to the dinner table and wonder why our children just won’t “look on the bright side” of Christianity. It’s what I hope pastors keep tucked in the back of their minds as they prep for sermons and sunday school lessons. And it’s what I hope we can all consider as we seek to make room for those with heavy loads by no fault of their own.
It is in the welcome that we might consider Jesus again, it is in the gentleness of another that we might know his kindness, it is in the light that we might see the truth—that no matter what, we are loved, seen, and known by a tenderhearted, caring Creator.
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