For the student with body broken and soul shattered. Filled with the overwhelming suspicion his existence is making things worse instead of better.
Can your soul feel its worth?
For the girl who says anxiety gnaws every minute of every day, fear of her mother’s life being stolen by the drug who has replaced her as highest priority and passion.
Can your soul feel its worth?
For the sisters who’ve saw loss upon loss. Abandonment, abuse, cancer, death, bullies, insult upon injury. Whose only relief seems to be in the deceptive release of the blade against skin.
Can your soul feel its worth?
For the child who can’t be convinced he belongs. Whose losses stack up greater than all his hopes. Who would rather contemplate death than risk daydreaming about life.
Can your soul feel its worth?
For the mother who is convinced. Convinced she’s incapable of being the nurturer that should be her very nature. Connived by shame to believe she’s wrecked beyond repair. Crushed by the belief that if anyone really knew, really saw her, they would turn away or turn her in.
Can your soul feel its worth?
For the grandparents, whose sunset years have clouded over with confusion, whose dependency increases and purpose seems to shrink with every passing day.
Can your souls feel their worth?
For the mothers and fathers, the sons and daughters, the grandmothers and caretakers, the citizens of war-torn Syria and war zones around the world. The faces caked in mortar dust. The eyes too destitute to even offer tears after witnessing loved ones gasp and die in the streets and children captured and drug away.
Can your souls feel their worth?
For the recipients of hate crimes, the victims of violence and threats and crude name callings that are becoming a common occurrence, attacks against the very image of God borne in humanity.
Can your souls feel their worth?
Here is our world, groaning in utter destruction and unmanaged pain.
Yet the mysterious prophecies remain, elusive but beckoning. Murmurs of a government upon the shoulders of One whose feet bring forth Good News, whose name is Wonderful Counselor, who’s leadership will multiply peace with no end to its increase, who’s very law is love.
May we be the desperate ones, the ones who wrestle, who hold onto hope expectantly, who won’t let go until we receive the blessing, until our eyes see the miraculous made known.
We’re wrecked, but let it be that when we’re sinking and the waters rise, we reach out our hand for the redemptive rescue.
“The shipwrecked…are the poor in spirit who feel lost in the cosmos, adrift on an open sea, clinging with life-and-death desperation to the one solitary plank. Finally they are washed ashore and make their way to the stable, stripped of the old spirit of possessiveness in regard to anything…They have been saved, rescued, delivered from the waters of death, set free for a new shot at life. At the stable in a blinding moment of truth, they make the stunning discovery that Jesus is the plank of salvation…!
All the time they were battered by wind and rain, buffeted by raging seas, they were being held even when they didn’t know who was holding them.” Brennan Manning- Shipwrecked at the Stable, Watch For the Light
Even if your eyes can see no light, your nose can’t catch the holy scent of fresh life, your hands feel no saving grip, your ears can hear no “Peace, be still”, your tongue can taste no sweet words of Good News, can you believe still?
Believe in the mystery beyond emotion and external evidence?
Believe there is a Love that will not let you go? Believe there is grace in abundance beyond comprehension? Believe the worth of your very soul is such that God would lay himself down, curl into a womb, and expose himself to the bitterest elements, injustice, and inferiority, for you?
Look around. Maybe you can see it. His light, shining from your child’s eyes, flickering from the stars, the waxing moon. Maybe you can smell his scent of life on your baby’s skin, in the crisp air blowing across the field, in the pine needles. Maybe you can feel his comforting touch in the calloused fingers of a grandparent, the warm dog on your lap, the handshake of a neighbor. Maybe you can hear echoes of his peace in a cardinal’s song, in the prayers of a parent. Maybe you can taste his goodness in the icy snow, in the warm tea, in the kiss of a spouse, in repeating the words of the Psalms.
May it be an Epiphany. Our souls awakening more widely, enraptured by Love made manifest, Light revealed. May it warm us until the sparks catch fire in another’s soul, until for those who live in a land of deep darkness, a great light will shine. Until HE appears, and every soul feels its worth.
“…You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net than you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing love of God made present in the manger.” ~Manning