Running on crutches

Have you ever had that horrible experience of breaking something that doesn't belong to you - specifically something that belongs to someone who is intimidating, someone who will be completely outraged by your clumsiness and who just happens to be about to walk through the door?

You wish you could yank back time. You wish you had magical powers of reconstruction. You wish the object could be unbroken.  

For me, struggling with mental illness was like that. I revolted against it. I didn't want it. I would have loved to have been able to control-alt-delete it - put it in a box and throw away the key.  I felt like I had ugly scars that had to be covered up - I found them repulsive, so surely everyone else would too - surely it's better not to have scars at all...?

And then you start to remember that Jesus himself is a man of sorrows, a man with gaping welted wounds, a man who was broken.

And you start to recognise that in him even your brokenness can be a gift - can yield blessings, for others yes, but also for you.

And you start to realise that actually you needed it. You needed waking up from the world's insistent storyline of success being the only thing that satisfies, success that is visible and linear, a to b and b to c, no interruptions, no detours, no setbacks.

You start to see his hand.

Suffering can cast a long shadow sometimes. It can claim that everything's ruined now, that nothing will ever be the same. But that shadow is a liar and a thief. Once you peer into it you'll find that all the shadow holds is Jesus. More of Jesus than you could have seen without it.

Which is why Christians down the centuries persist in making these bold, counter-intuitive claims - that darkness is bearable, that weakness is strength, that it is possible to run on crutches.

David: (Psalm 139)

'If I make my bed in the depths you are there...
Even darkness is not dark to you, the light will shine like the day'

Paul: (2 Corinthians 12)

'I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties so that Christ's power may rest upon me.' 

Spurgeon*: 

"I am sure that I have run more swiftly with a lame leg than I ever did with a sound one. I am certain that I have seen more in the dark than ever I saw in the light— more stars, most certainly—more things in Heaven if fewer things on earth! The anvil, the fire and the hammer are the making of us—we do not get fashioned much by anything else. That heavy hammer falling on us helps to shape us! Therefore let affliction and trouble and trial come." 

I watched the London Marathon this year and was taken aback by all the blind people running, and all the people running without their full complement of limbs. There was something really moving and beautiful about them. Thing is, I don't naturally associate disability with athletic success and inspiration. I don't naturally associate brokenness with fruitfulness. But God has bigger, better eyes than me and he is the kind of God who is able to change our eyes.

*quoted in Zack Eswine's 'Spurgeon's Sorrows'


On a similar theme see: Wounds of love