He is broken with us!

Some have requested the Peter Kreeft quote from the September 13 message entitled "Wisdom & Adversity." I'll do better than that and include not just the quote but a link to the excellent essay online. (I've actually referenced it more than once previously here at life together, but no matter. . . .)

Kreeft is showing us how the cross of Christ provides the way to deal with and process our own suffering/adversity. God has not give us a complete air tight answer, but, in fact, has given us something better than that . . . He's given us a Person. . . He's given us Himself. Once more we see how the Gospel is the center and the answer to all we experience in life.

Here's what was on the slides. . . .

In coming into our world He came also into our suffering…He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water.

Are we broken? He is broken with us.

Are we rejected? Do people despise us not for our evil but for our good, or attempted good? He was “despised and rejected of men.”

Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost? Do we ever say, “Oh, no, not again! I can’t take any more!”? He was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us? They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper.

Is our love betrayed? Are our tenderest relationships broken? He too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.”

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.

When we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our 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.