BitterSweetLife

Sermon prep is finally underway. Here's a quick slice that may or may not make the final cut.

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For now, pain creates an encounter, a portal, perhaps, to another world, because Christ was a Man of Sorrows, but he is sorrowful no longer. When our hearts begin to ache, we throw open the closet door where we conveniently stored Jesus, and call him to come forth to us.

We don’t realize that at the same time Christ is calling to us, like he called Lazarus: “COME FORTH!”—and Christ is standing on the other side of the grave. We have mistaken the living for the dead, the liberation for the shackles, but the pain drives us into the “closet” where Christ waits in the “darkness.” And then we realize, as C.S. Lewis says, “The inside is bigger than the outside.”

Where Christ stands, it is never dark. Suffering has no staying power. We have discovered Ultimate Reality because we stumbled into pain, because we began to carry our cross.