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Rewoven
I must confess, some of my favorite passages of scripture are when Jesus really tells it like it is to the Pharisees. How anyone could see Jesus as "just a good person" after reading this is beyond me (John 8:54b-58):
“...it is My Father who glorifies Me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God’; and you have not come to know Him, but I know Him; and if I say that I do not know Him, I will be a liar like you, but I do know Him and keep His word. Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.” So the Jews said to Him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am.”
This and other "I AM" statements Jesus made have come to mean something wonderful to me, personally. He didn't reveal these things about Himself to wow people. His "I AM" nature is what He came to offer us. He offers to place Himself right in the middle of whatever we're going through, have gone through, or will go through. There is no time constraint. He is: past, present, and future.
Abstract? Science fiction? No, very straightforward and very real.
I've wrecked a number of things in my life through miscalculations and misjudgments. I can't repair these things. The past stays put and can't be altered. But Jesus, being "I AM," can still redeem these things. As I yield to Him something I've destroyed, He reaches into it and begins reconstructing the eventual outcome. The event or decision itself may be stuck in time, but in His omnipresent hands, it is reconfigured. Instead of "my failure, end of story," it becomes "my failure, the seed of something that will one day become beautiful."
Nothing we've ruined is beyond His reach. It may never become what we thought it should be, or what the world tells us it should have been. Some beautiful relationships are lost forever. Many wonderful plans fall completely apart. Hearts and dreams get shattered beyond recognition. Yet these dropped threads of life can become knots Jesus uses to secure other threads in the back of His magnificent tapestry.
What might this look like in a life? There's nothing trite or simplistic about it: Things that were broken don't just seal back up again. But part of the way Jesus redeems the ruined things of our lives is through the very process of suffering. Suffering in His arms is like no earthly suffering. It can hurt as much as or even more than it normally would. But He wraps Himself around us; He reveals Himself in the midst of pain, even through pain. All pain He allows us to go through when we're committed fully to Him is for a sweeter purpose: to enrich our relationship with Him, and to reweave our lives in some new and deeper way. A needle must pierce the fabric in order to create a new garment.
Jesus restitches a tattered life with a holy, golden thread: Himself.