These tents called bodies weren’t meant to last forever. Broken hearts, busted-up bodies, damaged cells, and fading minds remind some of us daily of our mortality.

On this rutted road, we look to God together as followers of Jesus. We share and listen to one another about the torn fabric of our lives and the difficulty of the road under our feet. Then we remind ourselves and point each other to the One who walked the most unspeakably gnarly road ahead of us, FOR us. Because Jesus was willingly broken, we won’t be broken forever. I reach for a post-it to put these words before my eyes as an hourly reminder:

Because Jesus was willingly broken, I won’t be broken forever.

No matter what type or how extreme our experience of pain is, the truth is our pain is temporary. My pain, your pain, will not last forever. The Bible calls it a momentary, light affliction. I know there isn’t anything about suffering that feels momentary or light. From an eternal perspective, however, I imagine all the pain of my entire life contained in just one grain of sand out of all the sand in the world’s oceans. Because of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, the totality of the pain we experience amounts to what fits inside that one grain of sand. If it weren’t for Jesus, our pain and suffering would be unimaginably worse and unrelentingly ours forEVER.

We hear one another’s stories, shed tears, and nod soberly, understanding and honoring each other’s broken paths. United and bonded in Christ, we are grateful together for the One who suffered most and Who conquered death, suffering, and pain forever and ever.

“Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
2 Cor. 4:16-18

__________

Sitting in fresh grief and facing an unknown future, as all futures are, my tummy ached. Bravely, I told a close friend my soul was well, for indeed it was and is. But, I confided to her, my stomach was churning with unsettling butterflies in anticipation of an unknown that will be made known right around the corner.

She who knows me well is the safe sort of friend who can hold and handle my honest questions. “Is it a reflection of faithlessness that I feel sick to my stomach about this?” I queried, knowing she, who is wise, would also be gentle in her honesty.

My favorite and most trusted people are the ones who answer complex questions with Scripture or, like she did, with a recollection of how our Savior lived.

After a thoughtful pause, my friend began, “When Jesus was in the garden…” and I knew I was about to get the truth and nothing but the truth.
She reminded me of how Christ, in utter submission and complete confidence in God, probably had a tummy ache as He anticipated His suffering and what was coming right around the corner. His was a physical reaction of sweating blood that reveals to us the level of emotional, physical, and spiritual stress he was enduring as He anticipated the cross.

Dripping in kindness and her endearing British accent, my friend gently said, “At the moment, everything is up for grabs for you, isn’t it?” She paused. “Like Jesus in the garden.” At that moment, I felt like a permission-granted card had been gently pressed into the palm of my hand as she verified that yes, my soul can be well, and simultaneously, I can be anxious, nervous, and even afraid.

This morning’s reading in 40 Days of Decrease by Alicia Britt Chole is a timely ministry of God to my butterfly-infested tummy. In relation to Jesus’ incarnation, she asks, “What does it mean to be holy and human?” John 1:14 tells us that the holy became human: the “Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

Alicia claims, and I agree, “if we are not seasoned with the wrestling (of the incarnation), we tend to offer utterly unhelpful things to others and ourselves, such as, ‘You shouldn’t cry. God is in control. He works all things for the good of those who love Him, so there’s no need to feel _______’.”

There has never been anyone whose soul was steadier than our Savior’s soul. No one understood God’s sovereign control and goodness better than Jesus—and He wept and sweat blood in adversity. Many times during His earthly ministry, including in the garden, His tummy undoubtedly ached.
Which means it’s okay when ours does too.

(photo credit: Unsplash, Raygar He)