2024-12-19 A Meditation on Near to the Pain

“7 “Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes! 8 And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.” (Matt 18:7-9 ESV)

To speak out of a sincere heart, to warm to a sustenance from On High, these facts of life reveal themselves in a brinkmanship with both pain and injury, sickness and despair. To edge a bit nearer today to kerplop falling right back into a distantly recollected—for we are Witnesses not just to God’s goodness, but also to past headaches and hardships—ill-at-ease, malaise, or regrettable compromise, where our very foundations went topsy-turvy, where we longed just for mother’s embrace, father’s embrace, some relaxation of so many demands we place on ourselves, and this all in the name of wearied hearts.

Moreover, we can alight upon a streak of health, found in that Word which shies not from going full throttle, that undoes every structural integrity of our edifice of self-reliance, that speaks to the pain, that speaks to the Questions Asked: why me? Why here and now? Can we—not to jump there too quickly—emerge on the other side of a valley stride, a wilderness haunting, a scary adventure, in such good form as that our very soul relaxes its claims?

We saw enervated spirits draw near, fully enthralled with Holiness, with the Holy Spirit who slays in the spirit, who speaks on our behalf as we learn just to smile along, who Today has spoken from a rubric of Faith: Faith that we do not have all the answers, but that we can kerplop address the Matter. We can speak in tongues around what things we have no personal inner resolve to solve. We can lay off all the comfort zones that aren’t preaching Good News, Holy Service, Recruited or Conscripted Aptitude, Duty, Timeliness and Purpose.

We were once afflicted, but this only so that we would the more appreciate today’s Health. God lightened the burden, unclasped the headache, started—just started—to talk not just as a gladsome Friend, but as one who showed us the way even if it meant His own degradation and Death. We were not quite of aptitude to hear Him until suddenly that Nearer Presence, for a moment Ours, dispelled in Peace and in Beauty, in Calm distancing and Absence. For once we then recollected of how the window shades were pulled back and the door opened in gladsome Embrace, of the traveler, the sojourner, the admittedly Curious (did you break through the veneer of self-reliance? The veneer of All-Sufficiency? The veneer of personal Responsibility to be the one Leading?)

All of us know that friendly Encounter, to some degree. All of us know the Joy of a spirit larger than life, bigger than our hangups and going all the way through-and-through, through the Early Damage, through the Harping Concerns, through the “What’s Next?” mindset, us always waiting and never arriving. We claim Now as the right time to flourish, to liven, to learn our Inner Evolved Persistence will cause growth even when we let go the reins. Somehow we will Arrive, and do so Plucky and Fresh, to a mysterious realm of spirit, of pure wild-eyed chastity, of touching the pleasure zones of our soul, not our bodily frame per se, but opened up outward now, and blossoming, and showing the nectar that in all honesty we cannot claim to have earned or hoarded or accumulated. We are luscious, because that is how He has allowed for others to see us, not because of simple Fact but because of His Love that transcends our poverty-stricken nature. We are loved even while barren, before we blossom, flourish, Discover, and Grow. And if we grow, let it be at the behest of no sickly spirit, but a strong-armed Friend, who is gentle and lowly in mind and heart, in soul and spirit, whose frame is near but unimposing, because He already drew near in Word, that He might the more effectively absent Himself, withdraw, disappear to His own burdened outlet of the Cross, and we suddenly with a weight lifted that we knew not we had.

Did you see it happen? That the exemplar was a heavens opened up, a New Cultural Phenomenon and Commodity, widespread blanketing Mercy and Absolution, because He spoke of things too easily overlooked and disputed. We therefore completely forgot for a moment, that some things that tempt, are utterly powerful, except that they pass. We return to sanity, and in that sanity it is an Old Faithful go-to, the facts of temptation, of it all seeming “just right”, and this only because some love is holy love, and is shored up for such a time as it is decreed properly, and entered in upon.