For anybody
who is in pain, worried about experiencing pain, or concerned about someone who
is currently in pain – few things grab our attention more than the possibility
that our pain can be taken away. Physical pain, mental anguish,
stress, grief, worry - they all count - and we’re all experiencing one or more
of them right now. It causes us to ask the usual questions: Why me? Why now?
What next? What For? And maybe, Who’s next?
So this pain
often overtakes our world. It can seem like every movement, thought, and
passing moment further envelops us in an endless fog of hurt - is that as true
for you as it is me?
Maybe that’s
why Jesus spent so much time healing.
This Sunday
we’ll hear about two instances - a young girl and an older woman whose
suffering had consumed their lives. One had to crawl through a crowd to get to
Jesus, the other had flat out died. And in each instance, Jesus restored the
patient to full health.
It is in
stories like these, for there are many in the Gospels, that you and I see that
healing brokenness is one of God’s major concerns - perhaps God’s biggest
concern. What if we were asked to move beyond the ‘Why me?’ and ‘What for?’
questions and consider the bigger picture - that they speak of God’s deep
desire to reconcile and heal a broken world with and to the Love that created
it?
And while we
sit here, mired in our own worlds of hurt, we consider the challenge not to
make these stories all about us - and consider the possibility these stories
are really meant to point us to others. For we know that getting our eyes off
of ourselves and caring for others is the very best way to relieve our own
pain.
So, who is hurting around us? Where is the pain in our circle of
influence? How might we better identify and address the pain in our communities
and world - and become Jesus’ healing touch for them?
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Reading
Reading
The Guns of
August - Barbara Tuchman
Drive -
Daniel Pink
The
Challenge of Adaptive Change - Ronald Heifetz
