This is the second part in a three-part series this week. If you missed the last post, The Real Jesus. Part 1: The Unfixable Life, you can read that here.

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It was about three years ago. I remember sitting on my beige {formerly off-white} sofa. The old one that sags in the middle, worn and well-loved and with our family’s very DNA pressed into its fibers. My husband sat across from me in the plaid overstuffed chair. In the most passionate, compelling, and authentic way, he was trying to point me to Jesus.

But it just didn’t resonate with me and I couldn’t manufacture what he had. He knew Jesus in a way that I didn’t. His own journey had brought him face to face with the Jesus I couldn’t quite touch yet. There he sat, encouraging me with the gospel of grace and I couldn’t grab hold of it. His brokenness and humility had taken him to the cross in a way that was so very real and life-altering. I envied him.

Don’t get me wrong. I knew Jesus. I loved Him. I believed in Him. Intellectually I knew that my faith, my worldview, my hope — they were all anchored in Christ.

What I finally figured out and admitted to my husband that night in the living room was this: Jesus seemed like an abstraction. I didn’t know Him in the needful and desperate way I longed to know Him. Yes, it grieved me that He suffered and died on my behalf, on the world’s behalf. And yes, I was so very grateful. Of course. How could I not be?

I don’t want this to sound sacrilegious but I don’t know of another way to explain it. I liken it to a soldier who died for my life and my freedom or my family’s lives and freedoms. If the soldier was my husband, my brother, my son — well … the sorrow, the disbelief, and the deep-down gratitude would obviously flow too deep for words. It would change everything. But if the soldier was a man I never personally knew, perhaps someone I’d only read about in the newspaper, I would be sorrowful and grateful but in a more detached way. That’s because I didn’t actually know him and love him and need him; I merely appreciated him and what he’d done for me.

And that’s sort of how I approached Jesus, with intellectual knowledge and detached appreciation.

I had grown up in church. Jesus Loves Me was probably the first song I ever learned. At the age of eight, I sought a personal relationship with him. Yet here I was, 37 years old, telling my husband that Jesus was an abstraction to me.

When I first began praying, Jesus, make yourself real to me, the prayer I’ve prayed for the last three years, I actually thought something crazy and supernatural might happen right there in my living room. A vision. An overwhelming flood of the divine. An angel sitting next to me on the dilapidated sofa.

I wish I was kidding.

Desperation makes us crazy sometimes. I naturally have the heart of a skeptic; belief has never come easily. I needed something undeniably real and I half-heartedly hoped {and feared} that He would answer me in a powerful way. And quick. I was that anxious for Him to show up in an unmistakable way. I longed for a savior and a friend and a healer in my everyday unfixable life. Having Jesus for eternity seemed fine and good but let’s be honest — when the heavy pain of the everyday is bearing down on us hard, it’s not easy to cling to an abstraction or even to eternity. We want flesh and blood real.

And that’s exactly how He showed up.

It wasn’t immediate. It wasn’t a formula. It definitely wasn’t a vision in my living room. Rather, it was a slow knowing over months and years, a knowing that came to me through many different means of grace:

Scripture

Prayer

Counseling

Deep and honest community

Rest

Counseling others who were hurting

Listening to sermons {“The Wounded Spirit” by Tim Keller is a particular favorite.}

Reading books written by other struggling saints

Journaling

Conflict

Silence

Time

Practicing gratitude 

As weeks turned to months and months turned into years, I realized that Jesus was becoming more real, more touchable. He really was answering that simple, desperate prayer: Make yourself real to me.

His flesh and blood real life began to show up in my flesh and blood real life.

Scripture says that by his wounds you have been healed. Here’s what I know about wounds. They leave scars. In my quest to find relief and healing, I was strangely fixated on the concept of scars and how we resent the marks of imperfection they leave on us, sometimes staying with us forever. But early on in this journey, I was struck by the fact that Jesus chose to keep his own scars and the irony of Jesus healing our woundedness with his very own wounds.

I’m going to talk more scars in the next post, but for now, here’s what we need to know about them. We can be raised to new life and never lose our scars, our keepsakes of redemption.

And while there is more grace and hope and “beauty from ashes” than we can fathom, sometimes we’re still left to grapple with the consequences and to suffer through them day after day. Sometimes the consequences we face in this broken world full of broken people keep us from being able to fully bask in the beauty because we’re so smeared with the ash.

We’re gripped with fear and set off by triggers. Our physical and emotional health unravels. We see good things we can no longer have and we gaze upon once beautiful gifts now tainted. Relationships break. Dreams shatter. Things fall apart. Loved ones die. The innocent suffer. People hurt us. We hurt others.

I used to fixate on the overwhelming nature of the unfixableness of it all. I may always be prone to wrestle with the pain of this world more deeply than most people. I’ve always been wired this way.

But here’s the tenderness of the Father. If I didn’t have all of this brokenness, I’d run to Him less. If I didn’t have these still-healing wounds, I’d have little need of his balm. If my problems were manageable, well, I’d be managing them all by my capable self.

On my not-so-good days, I’m still prone to stew in resentment. I want to hide myself and my story. Sometimes because I’m prideful. Sometimes because I’m overwhelmed. Sometimes because I’m scared. But then there are those days of unmistakable grace, those day when I remember that in all things I can give thanks, that for those who love God all things work together for good, that in Christ we are a new creation, and that in Christ there is now no condemnation. On those days, I can see my brokenness as a gift and I can even dare to give thanks for all of it.

A dear and wise friend has reminded me more often than she knows that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. It was the very theme of Jesus’ earthly ministry {in my non-expert opinion.} This is the best news and it’s really the lens through which we see the Real Jesus.

Cluelessness and neediness and brokenness take you low, to that low place at the foot of the cross. When you’re there, bowed low in humility and dressed in emotional rags, you just have to look up. You have to.

Because you can’t help but notice what’s happening there. You see — hurting friend, will you please see — that the only perfect man who has ever lived — perfect in compassion, in love, in justice, in mercy, in power, in wisdom — He has dared to sink even lower than you because of his great love. He came to save you from your broken and bruised unfixable life and He did it by dying for you. He broke himself to redeem a broken world filled with broken lives.

Here’s the real truth. Whether all is well or all seems lost, we’re all born into an unfixable life. We can’t help it. There may be seasons, maybe years on end, when things are so swell, we forget how broken we actually are, how broken the world actually is. Give it time. None of us walk around on this spinning globe for long without shards of its brokenness leaving scars.

But it’s the gaping wounds, the ones we can’t bind on our own, the ones that if left unattended will make us bleed out altogether, it’s those that bring us crawling to that low place. And it’s there on that sacred, scorned, blood-soaked earth that we find both our Kindred and our Healer, the One who has suffered with us and for us and who heals us with his very blood.

We see that He’s got a gaping wound too — lots of them — and we see that He bled out even to the point of death so that we don’t have to.

It’s at the foot of the cross where things get real because we see that Jesus — fully man, fully God, fully perfect — bled out his love all over us.

This is the Real Jesus and this is where He becomes real to us. This is where He became real to me.

He is not some haloed, abstract, first-century saint printed on a Sunday School poster or painted on a tacky interstate billboard. He’s not simply someone we are supposed to believe in and ask into our hearts because He’s a ticket to Heaven. We don’t cash Him in like that.

He is our life. Our life forever, yes, but that’s really too much for our mortal minds to comprehend. He’s our life now. Today.

This unfixable life of yours and mine? He came to fix it but not usually in the way we expect. And He came with a generosity so big, He dares to promise, I came to give you life abundantly. Not in a prosperity gospel sort of way; He’s not cheap and slick. He is our abundance and if we have Him, we really do have all we need. We have a Counselor who has given us a way to live through His spirit at work in us and through his Word. We have a Savior who not only saves us from our sin {that broken, unfixed state we can’t help}, but who also saves us from ourselves, from what we think we want, and yes, even from an eternity spent apart from his presence.

But here’s the one that really speaks to me on those particularly unfixable days. We have a Kindred Healer, one who was tempted in every way, one who has hurt in every possible way, one who has been wounded, forsaken, falsely accused, put to shame, mocked, and ignored. One who knows what it’s like to lose the person you love most. On a real day in history, a real Jesus died an actual death on a real cross. God the Father turned his back on his beloved Son to make us His beloved. On the cross, Jesus — an innocent, bleeding man — cried out to his Abba Father, My God! Why have you forsaken me?

On that cross every single sin in the history of the world — every murder, assault, violation, theft, and lie; every illicit behavior, perversion, and selfish act; every impure thought, malicious desire, and unspeakable indifference to the oppressed — was all laid upon a perfect man. He died with it, descended with it, and reckoned with it.

And then he came back without it. He came back without it. 

Oh bleeding, wounded friend, do you know what this means? It means we can be rescued from the power and penalty of the brokenness too. In believing and receiving this truth, this person who is Truth — it saves us in both the eternal and the everyday sense. Jesus as Savior means He’s our Rescuer. Our Rescuer in an eternal sense, yes, but also our personal Rescuer as we put one foot in front of the other through each and every unfixable day and in each and every unfixable situation.

Jesus, as Kindred Healer, comes to you when you’re bowed low beneath the shadow of the cross and He tenderly lifts your face to meet his gaze. He sees what a mess you are — the bleeding wound here, the twelve-inch scar there, the heart that has been broken a hundred times too many, the conscience that is seared over and over again with shame, the mind that is clouded with doubt or confused by deceit or rattled by dysfunction. He sees you in that seemingly unfixable state and He comes to your rescue by journeying with you.

Sometimes the only thing that’s really changed is the company you keep.

And as you journey together through the Unfixable Life, you finally realize that He is Real. And He is all you need.

By his wounds you have been healed.

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Friday I’ll be back with the rest of the story. We’ll hear more about the journey through the healing process and the real truth about our scars. I’ll also share a few resources through which I’ve found comfort, truth, healing, and the Real Jesus. Thanks for grace as I offer this series that’s so very different than my usual fare.

May your own journey this Holy Week lead you that low place at the foot of the cross.

The Real Jesus: Part 1. The Unfixable Life.

The Real Jesus: Part 3. Why We Keep Our Scars

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