Tender Heart
“Love does not rejoice in evil”
I cried today over a story of a man dying in his mid 50s. Just a little anecdote; no significance or relationship to me, no special heaviness or spiritual emphasis. It wasn't said what disease he was dying from. It didn't need to be. The unnamed and silent killer is always assumed: cancer.
The human heart holds a special hate for cancer. The reason is fairly simple: it's everything that isn't meant to be in the experience of humanity.
God never wanted us to experience evil. He wanted to keep the knowledge of good vs. evil from being a part of the world we knew. We said no. We said we'd like to be our own judge, and thus our own God, and thus our own life force. But this can only lead to mutation, degeneration, and death.
Cancer is the gravest analogy, the foulest irony, the most bitter object lesson. It reveals sin all to perfectly. In many respects, it should be considered an autoimmune disease; it is defeat by your own body. Your own cells become useless masses of tissue—not really even life; kind of what we say fetuses are when we rip them up and suck them out. And so they keep on growing and reproducing, until they interfere with your body's functioning. They're the thorns that grow up and choke out the life before it can grow to its fullness.
The worst is when it is malignant. That's when pieces break off and migrate to other places, where they can start a whole new infection. The spread of disease—the spread of sin in your life. You can see now why leukemia is such a horrific form of cancer.
Now plenty of medical professionals could come in and tell me “Well, that's not entirely true” or “There's way more kinds of cancer,” but the point is the same. And the points I've made are true to at least a layman's level.
I'm not going to explain out this analogy terribly much. Some things you won't get until way later. Some things you'll probably get that I didn't. But I leave it to you to consider how much like sin cancer is—what an analogy and irony and object lesson it is.
I heard mention of a study recently of at least a form of cancer that was contagious. I'm not sure if it was just one form or a study suggesting “turns out you CAN catch it!” And I don't care. I'm just angry. That was the only way the analogy was incomplete. That was the only need of HIV; the infection that we spread through our idolatry, which then makes us kill ourselves, or at least our every defense from even the slightest evil.
Getting Softer
“Love hopes all things”
I'd had tears in my eyes just before this story, this time for a glory moment. A little boy and girl were in a boat that flipped upstream of Niagara Falls. The little boy was saved just feet from the tumultuous cloudy mist of incredible force that pummels the rocky scape below. First thing out of her mouth to her savior—the only man who cared to take action as the rest of the world looked on at this exciting spectacle—was a question: “Where's my brother.” The man looks up and then whispers in the girl's ear, and her hands cling together over her heart. He had seen the boy being sloshed and smashed upon the rocks and through the waves. He was far from rescue and far too close to the edge.
The words the man had whispered? “You need to say a little prayer for your brother.”
And the dark cloud of death, at the last moment when all hope was lost, became the sweet caress of a soft mist, floating him down to the bottom, where he would be rescued. All of his wounds and scars came from the raging rapids before his fall. All of them came from the tumbling and turning he'd done up before the great plunge. No harm at all was done by the drop itself.
Draw your own analogies, because there are plenty. But don't miss the big idea: it was a miracle.
And it glorified God.
Oh yeah
“Love bears all things”
What I was really wanting to say this time around was simply this: I'm not claiming to be super-spiritual or have any rights to say I'm closer to God than anyone else.
But I know I hunger and thirst for righteousness. So I know I'll be filled.
Because I hunger, because I thirst—because I yearn and burn and seek and deeply desire and dig my nails in and claw—I know that God will make me a righteous man, though at present all I know is my weakness. And so I know that He is changing me.
And the evidence for me is this: in a world that tells us to grow colder and more familiar with pain and sickness and death, it grows stranger to my eyes. Though I have watched enough filthy entertainment and killed thousands in bloody games of war and violence to numb my affections, and though my heart has been turned to stone by abuse and let-down and sickening travesties, though the scar tissue has grown thick and the callous deep from the rough familiarity with sin, yet am I unfamiliar. Each new knell of the death bell hurts more than the last. Each new story of pain cuts with lighter and still lighter blows. I'm changing. I'm growing soft. And He's to blame.
~While we were still sinners, He endured the shame; how can I ever be ashamed?
-Colton J. Stollenmaier, M.I.A.
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