I don't know why, but I believe I'm supposed to share them here...with you. Maybe you're in a dark place and need to be reminded, "No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still." (Corrie ten Boom).
Wherever you are...whatever you are going through...be reminded--God is with you...right there...right now.
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"I could never believe in God if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the Cross'." In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I've entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before his statue--his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But, each time, after awhile I've had to turn away and, in my imagination, I've turned instead to that lonely twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorns, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, PLUNGED IN GOD-FORSAKEN DARKNESS. THAT IS THE GOD FOR ME! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us." (John Stott)
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"Calvary is Judo. The enemy's own power is used to defeat him. Satan's craftily orchestrated plot, rolled along according to plan by his agents--Judas, Pilate, Herod, Caiphas--and culminated in the death of God. And, this very event, Satan's conclusion, was God's premise. Satan's end was God's means. God won Satan's captives--us--back to himself by freely dying in our place.
It is, of course, the most often-told story in the world. Yet, it is also the strangest, and has never lost its strangeness, its awe, and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze upon things at which we yawn.
(But), however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs. We needed a surgeon. He came and reached into our wounds with bloody hands. He didn't give us a placebo or a pill or good advice. He gave us Himself.
He came. He entered space and time and suffering. He came, like a lover. He did the most important thing and He gave the most important gift: Himself. It is a lover's gift.
Out of our tears, our waiting, our darkness, our agonized aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, out of our cry, 'My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?' He came, all the way, right into that cry.
He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected...despised? He was 'despised and rejected of men.' Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifying familiar ghost? Do we ever say, 'Oh, no, not again! I can't take it any more!'? Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us?...
Is our love betrayed? Are our tenderest relationships broken? He loved and was betrayed by the very ones He loved....
Does it seem sometimes as if life has passed us by or cast us out, as if we are sinking into uselessness and oblivion? He sinks with us. He too is passed over by the world. His way of suffering love is rejected; his own followers often the most guilty of all; they have made His name a scandal, especially among His own chosen people....We have made it nearly impossible for His own people to love Him, to see Him as He is, free from the smoke of (prejudice), battle and holocaust.
How does He look upon us now? With continual sorrow, but never with scorn....We, His beloved and longed for and passionately desired, are constantly cold, correct and distant to Him. And still He keeps brooding...like a mother who has had all her beloved children turn against her: 'Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you.'
He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn His face from us, however much we turn our face from Him.
Does He descend into all our hells? Yes. In the unforgettable line of Corrie ten Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp, 'No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still.'
Does He descend into violence? Yes, by suffering it and leaving us the solution that, to this day, only a few brave souls have dared to try....
Does He descend into insanity? Yes, into that darkness too. Even into the insanity of suicide? Can He be there too? Yes, He can. 'Even the darkness is not dark to Him.' He make light even there,...though perhaps not until the next world, until death's release.
LOVE is WHY He came. It's all love. The buzzing flies around the cross, the stroke of the Roman hammer as the nails tear into His screaming flesh, the infinitely harder stroke of His own people's hammering hatred, hammering at His heart.
Why? For LOVE....
(From this moment on), when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or hearts, we can know--we MUST know--that He is here with us, taking our blows. Every tear we shed becomes His tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but He makes them His. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or His tear-filled ones?
He came. He is here. That is the salient fact. If He does not heal all our broken bones and loves and lives now, He comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished.
And, He shows us that (from this moment on), we can use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love. SINCE WE ARE HIS BODY, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our very failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love....
God's answer to the problem of suffering not only really happened more than 2,000 years ago, it is still happening in our own lives....All our suffering can become part of His work, the greatest work ever done--the work of salvation--of helping to win eternal joy for those we love."
("Shared Hells" by Peter Kreeft)
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