I stand in a darkened room with thirty faces pointed up at
me. I’ve been
Today we talk about how the world hurts. How it’s hard and
unfair and downright mean. All day I’ve been asking the kids who troop through
here, “What hurts in your life right now?” I’ve heard a lot of my mom makes me eat green beans and I fell off the trampoline.
But not these kids. They are old enough now to know the deeper hurts life brings.
The hands shoot up and the sorrows start piling up like
wailing. My parents got divorced. My mom
has cancer. My sisters died. I never got to meet my dad. And in the eyes of
some of them I can see the unspoken: Someone
close to me has hurt me deeply.
My helpers behind me can’t write fast enough. They fill the
white board with words of hurt, betrayal, pain, confusion. The kids and I stare
at all that muck. Yes, life hurts us, doesn’t it? And as we spray the words
with water and they start to run down like tears, like smudges of filth that
don’t make any sense, I want to weep for them. God’s beloved.
And this is how it feels, isn’t it? Like we just can’t stop
crying sometimes. Like the pain is going to keep running inside us forever and
it won’t end.
They are so riveted they have forgotten their masks. They
stare at me. I wonder if anyone has ever given them permission to say yes, life
sucks.
I find myself telling them their lives may look like this
for a long time. Hard. Messy. Painful. It may not get easier. But. But. And I can feel the deep inhalation
in the room, and I will my words to come out right, to go straight into their
broken hearts.
But when we know
Jesus, we have a best friend who never fails us. Never betrays us. Never leaves
us. We have a best friend who has the power to love us forever.
And THE kid, the one who has fought against us all week, the
one who mocked me yesterday when I presented Jesus, who told all of us to shut up, that kid is sitting front and
center, and he’s looking at me with this confused hope. He’s about to jump out
of his skin.
After Jesus died for
you—YOU!—he went up to heaven and he is there, preparing a place for you. A
beautiful place with no more tears—ever. No sadness, no sickness, no fear.
I ask them what they think heaven will be like and the
church kids start throwing out the standard responses. One kid asks if people
will be made of clouds. I feel the moment slipping away. And then this kid, the
one whose eyes haven’t left my face, he jumps up and he shouts,
“And we will get to SEE Jesus there???”
My heart bursts. I can hardly hold back my tears. Yes, oh yes, we get to see Jesus.
Only the hopeless can fully grasp the hope of this message.
“But, I always thought when we died we just went to sleep in
the ground forever.”
And I get to say, no, no, no! You get to see Jesus. You get
to live forever with the one who loves you forever. And this? All of this? He
will turn it all to purest gold.
The time ends and that kid walks out of my life, maybe
forever. But he has forever marked my heart, and I pray he doesn’t forget this
hope. I pray he grasps the only truth that can anchor him through the storms
that are surely coming.
I am so focused on him that I never notice the quiet girl in
the corner, the one who stays afterward and looks at me with eyes full of
sadness. She tells me in halting words that she wants this hope. She wants
Jesus to be her best friend.
We pray together. The wonder of this gift astounds me and I
understand why I am the one who is
blessed. To be there when someone meets Jesus for the first time, to feel the
truth of his forever-love flooding into her heart—it is a great gift.
This morning I watch the sun rise and I think of those kids
and all those tears running down. I stop and I am still—finally—and I give him
my own tears. I decide to live like I really believe it. Jesus is my best friend,
the friend who never fails me, and he has the power to love me forever. And
someday all this will be turned to gold.
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