"I saw you early this morning, more weary than the centuries since Abraham--since Adam. My heart broke. I said, What is he thinking? Does he love me now?"
Those lines keep returning to my mind this day they call Good Friday. How He, Who was before Adam, chose to go through torture and beyond. For everyone.
It was hard, when I read with the children, and was explaining to them what it meant to be scourged. And my chest lumped up as I pictured His back. Then how they put a crown of thorns on His head and I picture the piercing thorns point inward to His human brain. I didn't want to keep on reading.
Worst was the mocking actions, putting a purple robe on Him in His wretched state and pretending to worship. It is too much. Awful, horrible, downright wrong. And I don't want to read it. Think on it. Look at Him.
But I do. I look at Him. See Him in His pain and vulnerability and absolute weakness.
Because looking at what He did and still does for me frees me. Gives me clear sight.
This morning I sat at the optometrist's with dilated eyes. No contacts or glasses and all looked like trees. I talked with a woman and her two year-old but I didn't really know what they looked like. Just blurry blobs of tree.
But this day, this awful, awesome day. It restores sight to my eyes.
For in seeing Him, in receiving His gift of being crushed for my sin, I am healed.
Healed to see life clearly for what it is.
We take the Christmas tree trunk and saw it in two.
We take a nail and drive the pieces together.
And I see His pain. And I see His gift. The gift of the real me, rebirthed by His death.
Quote taken from Reliving the Passion by Wangerin, Jr., p.136, book photo of three of our favorite Easter stories.
