Isaiah 53:5-6 - The Story Is Real

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Isaiah 53:5-6

Once upon a time there was a couple that lived in paradise on earth. They had everything they could have ever wanted and needed, and they had peace and fellowship with an all-powerful God. God wanted them to love Him by choice, so He gave them a choice. Their choice became the first sin and led to separation from God and ultimately, to their deaths. Their children grew up in a world that was less-than. They were filled with fear and made choices that made things worse. Everything spiraled beyond their control.

But God did not reject the human race. Throughout history, He spoke to just the right people at just the right times to communicate His plan to fix this broken, ugly mess. He would send His son to pay the price, to restore the fellowship that was broken, making it possible for everyone to choose life in Him.

And...

He did it through Jesus's death, burial, and resurrection.

Isaiah 53 contains one prophetic message, among many others in the Old Testament, written long before Christ was ever born.

And it happened.

He paid the price, righted our wrongs, and made it possible for us to live with God forever.

I am a lover of stories. I've studied ways to make a good one in painstaking detail. I love the way the plot of any good story has an all-hope-is-lost moment (seriously, Google it), and for readers to be satisfied by any tale, it has to have sufficient resolution. I am frustrated by writers who intuitively do it all right without having to try as hard as I have to. But the most crazy, amazing thing to me is that the story that does that best, that did it first, is the REAL one.

I love reading and writing fiction on an obsessive level. One observation I can never escape, is that the story that created the framework I love living through again and again is God's story about His love for mankind, the drastic steps of frantic love that He took to redeem us, and how He overcame death in spite of anguish and pain, just like the true hero of any story.

But he's the real hero. His story is actually non-fiction.

He loves us. He made us to love Him. Our lives are all a part of this story whether we know it or not. God is still writing about us, still enacting his plans for the future. We are all going to live in this story forever, and in His grace, Jesus made a way for us to be on the winning side.

Believers will live in heaven forever. I'm not entirely sure as to what will be going on for us all there, but I do know that it will be amazing. God has shown us enough in His word and through near death experiences, visions, and dreams of believers that hint at the ultimate satisfaction of every longing or desire we've ever had on this earth.

As a person that has wanted to climb inside so many stories and live there, it's both comforting and exciting to know that... I am living inside a story. I'm not it's Author, but I get to participate in the role God Himself penned for me.

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” - C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” - C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Life Verse: Hosea 6:1-3 - He Will Bandage Our Wounds

Come, let us return to the Lord.

He has torn us to pieces;

now he will heal us.

He has injured us;

now he will bandage our wounds.

In just a short time he will restore us,

so that we may live in his presence.

Oh, that we might know the Lord!

Let us press on to know him.

He will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn

or the coming of rains in early spring.

Hosea 6:1-3

When I had the opportunity to teach English in China for a little over a month in college, to say that I had some anxiety issues would be putting it mildly. Any time I was not teaching or participating in scheduled activities with our hosts, I was literally hiding in my dorm room obsessing over lesson plans and listening to Ginny Owens and Audio Adrenaline on my old school discman, reading 2 Corinthians 1:8-11 multiple times per day, and waiting for my Yahoo Mail to load on the slowest internet connection ever hoping to hear an encouraging word from someone.

As a culmination of the summer school program, each class was scheduled to put on a small skit version of a fairy tale or fable, showcasing the students' increasing English skills in front of all of their parents and the community. I wrote my dramatization of The Three Little Pigs, selected what roles all my 2nd and 3rd grade students were to play, and set about finding props to illustrate the three types of houses. I was able to use construction paper for the straw and stick houses, but I wanted something special for the brick house. It took a lot of effort and an embarrassing language faux pas at the town's super department store to find myself in possession of a cardboard box to use to create it.

The day of the presentation came with many dramatic things planned for our performance, including other skits that subtly declared the gospel in a way that the government couldn't protest. 

Just as we were loading up the bus with the students, a quick downpour occurred ... right on all of my props. The brick and stick houses survived, but the straw house was badly damaged. I was unable to control myself and downright sobbed in front of everyone the whole way to the auditorium.

When we arrived there, one of the Chinese-American interns waited till I wasn't as much of a mess and dragged me into the bathroom with that straw house. At first I was embarrassed and angry because she was the calmest, most self-composed person of the whole group and had really intimidated me for most of the trip. But I don't remember any word that she spoke. She took a pair of scissors and cut the tape that secured all of the construction paper together and then silently dried each warped piece under the hand-dryer until each one was relatively straight and unwrinkled. Then she taped them all back together, good as new.

While she was doing this, I felt God speaking to me: "This is what I am doing in you. You just have to be patient. Yes, it's painful,  but it will all be worth it in the end." It wasn't an audible voice, but those words are the ones I always hear in my memory.

This life metaphor has stayed with me and has proven true for me. More recently, the little and big downpours of my anxiety and depression were turned into a hurricane of circumstances I am not even sure how I lived through. By God's grace, I'm on the other side of it, and for once I really, really feel and recognize the continuing truth of what God spoke over me that day.

My life was absolutely destroyed, and I was in the worst desolation I could have imagined. I couldn't even find any of the pieces, but God kept them in the palm of His hand and is slowly, patiently drying all the damaged and defective parts of me with His Word and fitting them back together into something that I can't even describe and still don't have a clear view of at this point. He knows how to create beauty with the mosaic pieces of the soul.

All I know, is that I used to be living in a prison that - as a daughter of God - I had the keys to, and now each day I wake up surprised to find that I can walk in the freedom of a new day, with new insights, and a new hope. 

The hope that was the tiniest speck of light in the night of my despair has grown and is growing. 

It overwhelms me.

Further thoughts:

• Hosea sung by Shane and Shane

Luke 8:39 - Tell Them Everything

"No, go back to your family, and tell them everything God has done for you." So he went all through the town proclaiming the great things Jesus had done for him.

Luke 8:39

This is what we see the man who had a legion of demons cast out of him doing in the wake of his miracle. The demons are cast into swine and fall off a ravine and die. The town is so disturbed by this miracle that they beg Jesus to leave. The one who was healed wants to stay with Jesus, but he obeys Jesus's directive to go tell others about what had been done.

His story is one that shook the foundations of what the people around him could understand. The idea of someone powerful enough to cast out demons they had long feared was terrifying. I can only imagine the responses to the man's story as he proclaimed it. 

Shock. Awe. Belief. Hope.

As believers, we may not have stories that are as dramatic as this man's life, but we do have our stories. 

They matter. 

Our job is to tell them with the intensity with which we feel them. We need to share the details of who we were before and who we are now and who we, with God's grace, may become. This is the kind of stuff that everyone on earth hungers and thirsts for - the idea that we are loved, that we can be redeemed.

Our prescribed "testimony" of date, age, and place of salvation is not bad, but it's not as moving or as compelling as our personal narratives, the ups and downs of our relationship with Jesus. We don't need to tell every gory detail we've ever experienced in our lives, but we do need to be real and honest.

The world is looking for someone or something to connect with, and stories are the absolute best. Especially the stories that are true.