The Perfume Within the Pain

The crushing moments of life have been so extensively written about in mankind's history that I wonder if I can contribute anything useful from within my own hammering upon the anvil. It has been said of evil that 'man's inhumanity to man is one of the most verifiable features of our existence'. It seems that this holds no less in the case of our own individual grief and sorrow - there seems to be no lack of it in supply. We have all either experienced it or will experience it in future; there is none that is spared. While it comes in many forms, few are as excruciating as those delivered by those closest to us.

The heart that is speared and the pain within the chest is no illusion; it is physically felt. The feeling is akin to someone holding the heart from within while it is beating, and squeezing it until it can beat no more. I've been told by others that have experienced it that this is the physical pain of heartbreak. The treasure that was most precious and kept carefully for so many years without being given away was treated as something cheap, trampled on and then shredded into ten thousand pieces. What is gone forever can never again be regained. Betrayal unlike anything experienced before has burnt everything built on trust down to the ground - there is not even foundation stone to be seen anymore. No comforting music soothes the soul; distractions are futile; money is as worthless as the paper that it is printed on; there is only so much that friends can do. In those moments, what do we do? When the heart is being torn asunder, to where will we run for comfort?

It is in the midst of the crushing agony that something draws me to yet another place of incredible grief and sorrow unlike any other in all of history - on level ground, at the foot of the Cross. I gaze at this incredible edifice in my mind. Though thousands of years old, the timber has not faded, cracked or begun to disintegrate. The wood is still stained with the blood that ran down in rivers from the body of Him who hung there. Though His body hangs there no more, the testimony of His suffering resonates in the silence that is almost deafening. In my own pain, I reach out and touch the wood, tracing my fingers over the stains of the blood flow that were indelibly soaked into it. As I gaze upwards at the holes in the wood where the nails were driven in, I realize that His pain that still resonates from the Cross was because of me - it was I that nailed Him there, and drove the spear forged from my own sin through the heart of the only pure One that ever walked this earth. And I am engulfed by the memory that with His broken and ruptured heart, He still looked upon me with love, forgave me and died there. As the pain reaches its crescendo and my own heart ruptures with this realization, the power of the Cross simultaneously reaches its maximum. For from within the pain contained with the blood-soaked wood of the Cross, a perfume begins to emerge, the scent of which is unmatched by any blend made by man in all of history. As I inhale through the tears, it speaks wisdom.

The excruciating pain of my own painful experiences allows the perfume of Him who I crucified here to infuse my own heart and spirit. And as the precious bottle of my own heart is broken, the perfume of Christ that is held within His Cross begins to penetrate my heart and to spread from within it. And it is at those moments of greatest pain that my Father is able to do His most powerful work, for His Sprit moves to transform me in that moment of crushing unlike at any other. I am reminded that the greatest power of Christ's life emerged not in His preaching or miracles, but when He was crushed on the Cross for what I had done. And if I desire to be like Him, the same inevitable fate awaits me as well; I cannot escape and will not be spared. I am reminded of the saying 'Him whom God would use greatly, He will wound deeply', and the statement quoted by Chuck Swindoll that 'When God wants to do an impossible task, He takes an impossible person and crushes him.'

Those who hurt me matter no more; they fade into the background as the perfume of Christ spreads around both me and His blood-stained Cross that I lean against so lovingly. One word escapes from my lips, calling the One whose Son I crucified and whose perfume I now inhale, by the most intimate name that I address Him by: "Papa". The response is instantaneous; He drops everything and comes running. The crushing is not over; it is not His time for the pain to leave yet. But He is there, grieving with me and for me in the midst of it all. He is there. And that is enough.

- The Wisdom Seeker

I had come across this poem in a talk given by Ravi Zacharias titled 'The Preparation and Portrait of a Prophet.' Thought I'd share it here. I think we can all identify with having gone through such experiences of pain, anguish and agony at some points in our lives, or maybe some of us might be experiencing it even now. I hope it speaks to you, if it happens to be such a time in your life.

When God Wants To Drill A Man

When God wants to drill a man,
And thrill a man
And skill a man

When God wants to mold a man
To play the noblest part,
When He yearns with all His heart
To create so great and bold a man
That all the world might be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways.

How He ruthlessly perfects,
Whom he royally elects.

How he hammers, and hurts him,

And with mighty blows converts him
Into trial shapes of clay
That only God understands,
While his tortured heart is crying
And he lifts beseeching hands.

How He bends, but never breaks
When his good, He undertakes
How He uses, whom He chooses
And with mighty acts induces him
To try his splendor out,
God knows what He's about.

- Anonymous

I will write more on this in the coming days and weeks. Have a good week and God bless.

The Wisdom Seeker

The questions we fear to ask ourselves...

Well, it's been almost a week since the last post. Trying to figure out how to code an RS-232 communications module in Java burns up time very quickly. But the feeling of accomplishment at the end of it does feel very good!

While talking with a close friend a few days back, some questions were raised during the course of the conversation that gave both of us quite a bit to think about. Thinking over the possibility that he had become extremely critical of anything and everything (including other people), he questioned whether he in turn followed the high standards that that he held other people to. He also mentioned that there were many other such questions that he was terrified to ask himself. I noted that this held true for me too. His next sentence, in his own words was: "Living a delusion seems far easier, wouldn't you agree?"

That's a comment we often make when confronted with life's tough questions, isn't it? I think most of us would agree that among the hardest and most frightening of these questions are those regarding our own individual natures - the truth of who we really are. They also happen to be those which we are most reluctant to face. It is indeed a sobering prospect to be confronted with the pronouncement of Christ, when He states that we shall be judged with the same metric that we use to judge others (Matthew 7:2). The book of Proverbs notes that it is the composition of what is contained in the human spirit that determines what flows out of the life and individual that it powers (Proverbs 4:23).

Connecting these two statements, does it not then make sense to examine our fundamental paradigms of our nature, the 'lens' through which we see the world, if we really want to change who we are? Living a delusion and running away from the reality of the situation only makes the pain of the gap more intense. The Law of the Harvest - 'as a man sows, so shall he reap', inevitably comes true. I have come to believe that it is experiencing and dealing with the painful, hard questions and events of life that truly change us from the inside out; we are forced to confront ourselves and what we truly are. Only when we have looked in the mirror, and seen ourselves with all the whitewash stripped away, can we see the gap between what we are and what we must become. And that results in the drive to change.

I don't mean to say that I am able to bravely ask those questions of myself. Just like my friend and those reading this, there are sobering questions that similarly terrify me. But I also know that if I don't ask those questions of myself, I won't change and I will remain mediocre. And that prospect is even more terrifying. As I noted to myself seven years ago: "Victory is purchased at a cost...what price are you willing to pay?" So at all costs, we have to work up the courage to ask those tough questions of ourselves, eh?

Anyway, I think that's enough for now. Have a good weekend!

The Wisom Seeker