Tag Archives: Pain

Jesus Wept

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This was the writing prompt I found:

In order to grow, I feel I need to…

            Cry.

            That’s all. Simple. I’d John 11:35 it. Jesus didn’t cry though. He wept according to some versions of biblical text. One short sentence. Two words. Jesus wept. Period. Full stop.

In order to grow, I feel I need to…

            Weep.  

            Weeping seems like more of a holistic release. A slow burn. Letting the tears fall where they may. Instead of blood-letting—tear letting, as it were. Slit those ducts open and let it rip.

            Fill in the blank: _______ wept.

            I used to cry quite a bit, back in the day, before pain, hurt, and loss weren’t thrown into an everlasting pyre and minimized as “life is difficult”– nothing to feel here. What the… How in the world?

“Have a heart,” they say.

“Do I have a heart?” I ask.

My as-sigh-nment this week from my counselor is to sit with the pain. What pain? Which pain? I’ve been to pain and back many times. Haven’t you?

Wait.

Sit.

Jerry, sling your memories over your shoulder as best you know how. Gather up your humanity and come down to the river. Be brave and vulnerable. I’ll help you unpack it. You know how people say “I laughed until I cried.” It works both ways, you know. You’ve said over the years “tears lubricate the soul”. You’ve stopped taking your own medicine. Your heart is broken, but not broken open. I Am a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. I’ll sit with you by the river as long as it takes. I want to replace the stony parts of your heart and give you a heart of flesh. Do you want a heart like that?  

  

“He leads me beside still waters and restores my soul.” Psalm 23

  

Beauty Just Is, It Doesn’t Ask

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Or does it?

“I don’t have the strength to engage beauty.”

He said it with resignation. I have been sitting with his statement for a while now. Does it really take energy to interact with beauty? For me, at least the past decade or so, my receptors have been maturing in all things aesthetic. Whether it be nature or music or woven words or visual art I sense a wooing, like someone saying “pssst, over here, look!” Receiving comes fairly easy, yet I think my friend is right. It is not effortless. Beauty doesn’t come barging in without knocking. We have to be open.

Then I asked myself how a person can get to a point where beauty becomes a beast. Before awakened by a poem over a decade ago, why was I walking by roses with my nose in the air? Why was the thought of engaging a rose a thorn in my flesh?

I asked my friend why he didn’t have the strength.

“There is too much crap in my life. It has drained me. I don’t have an ounce left to see how you see right now.”
I know his life and he is absolutely right. There is a lot of crap. It takes energy to ‘deal’ with crap too. Then I wondered if I am living in a state of denial because there is crap in my life too. I began asking myself if I was delusional. Am I not ‘dealing’ with it? I’ll ask my wife. She will know.

In the mean time I ache. The ache is for my friend and others who don’t have an ounce to spare. They stop to smell the roses and all they feel is the prick of a thorn.

I asked another friend for thoughts on this topic and the response added new light.

“Hurt and pain creates walls.
Anger creates a thick buffer to beauty,
stiff arming, and squeezing eyes shut.
The truth of it, though,
is that once you open to beauty
it feeds…it does not drain/pull/deplete.”

Openness to beauty is a perspective. It is an attitude. It is almost an altitude. A rising above, suspending, transcending the crap of this life in which we live. There is hurt and pain in this life. Anyone saying it doesn’t exist is delusional. But in and through the sharp points grows life up to the buds, petals, color, and grace of beauty.

Give us eyes to see.

It takes faith, trust, and hope to allow ourselves to receive beauty, because at any moment the uglies of existence can block our view.

“Beauty for ashes” is my prayer, and the grace to receive the beauty.

“Give them bouquets of roses instead of ashes, messages of joy instead of news of doom, a praising heart instead of a languid spirit. Rename them ‘Oaks of Righteousness’ planted by God to display his glory.” Isaiah 61:3 The Message

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS9v4ILPa7LxfnynnuS6xCmmydwU8OHw1s2x8VEOBtmr4GYQwNxLQ

This discussion could go on for quite a while. Do you have any thoughts on this? Care to join in?

Mother Mary. A Mother’s Day Reflection

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She pondered these things in her heart.

Mothers do that quite often.

She kept all these things.

My mother did too.

 

An angel told Mary.

The power of the Highest will.

An overshadowing of foreshadows.

“For with God nothing will be impossible.”

 

All mothers are infused with possibilities.

They lay down their self dreams

and rest folded hands upon

their distended bellies.

 

Mary carried wonder

full term and delivered hope.

There was blood and water and child.

All mothers hold pasty skin to chest with awe.

 

My mother held each of us close for a moment.

A snip of the umbilical and the separation

began a journey of contemplation.

What will? What if? Life.

 

Mary’s path was set.

From empty womb to empty tomb

the realities of motherhood were multiplied.

The gestation in her heart left stretch marks of spirit.

 

Near the end Mary drank of the cup no mother should.

She wept just like Jesus and red drops fell

as sweat on her brow as she prayed.

Blood fell on her and for her.

 

No mother should lose a child.

My mother was ten for ten when she died.

She was spared Mary’s anguish under a broken sky.

Jesus spoke living words. “Woman, behold you son! Behold your mother.”

 

Even in death he loved her so and knew hers was an acquainted grief.

I wonder if Mary was one who anointed his body.

Those things she held in her heart poured

on and massaged in his skin.

 

Then came the first Mother’s Day.

Sunday he was birthed again to Mary’s arms.

The Rose of Sharon was given from her loving Father.

She then held him close and smelled the fragrance of redemption.