Childhood carries with it a myriad of splintered pieces—both good and bad encounters. There are moments of great joy, happily remembered and stored in the heart. Yet they are undergirded by grievous flashes, fragments of a lost soul. Life has a way of fusing them all together into the amalgam we have come to know as “us“. Some of us reveal these affects in our daily stride. There are those of us that march along with determination, never looking down to check our gait, just power-walking forward. Others tiptoe all the way, never looking up for fear that their step might slip. Some just shuffle, feeling so worn out they can barely lift their feet. But the majority just plod along, in stride, disregarding the past— to its past. It’s easier when we don’t consider too much.
But is it really? Don’t we long to be known? Aren’t we meant to be known? Who doesn’t truly want someone to accept and love them with all their disparate pieces undraped. Being liberated from the pretense of our own sketched portrayal of wholeness, is a tranquilizer for the soul.
Nevertheless, lived experiences at any point on the emotional spectrum, can’t be fully perceived by anyone other than the one who has lived through it. Words can only capture so much. How do you explain the heaviness of your feet to a power-walker? Or you’re overly cautious steps to those plodders who rarely think about outcomes?
But our stride has not been formed in isolation. There is no underground atmosphere for the One who created all life. All those puzzle-pieces, the amalgamation that is you, every step, each joy and grievous flash, were all seen and felt by the One who knows all things.
He too knows what it is to be human. He not only made us mind, body, and soul, but he stepped into this very humanness in the person of Jesus. God became man. Just let that sink in…
But why? Why would a holy God come live in an unholy world?
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
John 3:16-17 NIV
