My heart hurts. Physically aches. I know you've felt it before. I know you know that feeling in your chest where the weight of something is pressing in so hard that you can't breathe. It's a feeling that can sneak up on you, show up in the blink of an eye or make itself known well in advance and slowly progress while you watch and wait. It's a feeling that can come through your own experiences, because of the actions of another or felt from the sidelines as you have to be a spectator in someone's story.
Today this feeling that engulfs me and many others in my community of believers comes from seeing another hurting. It comes from watching and waiting and praying for a miracle for a precious unborn life. It comes when everything has reached the point of too much and the only ability you have is to sit and feel everything around you. It comes from that place that lacks all understanding and has nowhere to turn except upward with a great distressing why.
I want to cry and I want to hide and I want to scream at the top of my lungs that it's just not fair and I just don't get it. And often I do. Then I am reminded that it should always feel like too much. On this earth, the hurt we see, the hurt we feel and the hurt we cause is too much. It's too much because God's perfect design was tainted when sin entered the world. In a place where there was supposed to be none, any, is too much.
You can look next to you at any point of your day and see someone who has a story, a need, an idol, a sin and a struggle because of it. If you go about your day with your eyes wide open to the world around you, your heart will have the potential to always ache and always mourn for every single person you pass.
Truly, the dangerous thing is for the ache to never come. The dangerous thing is to never feel the hurt for yourself and those around you. The dangerous thing is for your heart to become so hard and callous that no hurt can get in. The hurt is what takes you to Jesus. The hurt is what makes you remember that it is all too much and you need to take it to someone, the only One, who can handle it all.
Many times we get to see the causes and effects of life play out. We see the natural path that is being taken due to choices. Those obvious consequences for actions, whether difficult or not, are at least easy to understand. So many others times we are left in bewilderment. We are left to wonder and wait, or just wonder and trust. The Christian life doesn't give us a crystal ball into each of our lives and the experiences that are coming. We don't automatically know it all and automatically get to understand and handle everything in the perfect "christianlike" manner. What we get is a Savior who loves us and comforts us. We get a spirit that guides us down even the rockiest of roads. We get a sovereign creator who is ever faithful and even if we never see the whys we see Him.
And even this moment as I question this current why, I know that even if I never understand, I have a Savior who does. He hurt far more than I ever could, He loved far more than I ever can. Whether it is with tears streaming down my cheeks, jaw clenched, or peace that passes all understanding, I will hold fast to my confession of faith and draw near to the throne of grace to ask and receive mercy and grace in this time of need for myself and my dear friends because I have a high priest who understands whether I ever will or not. (Hebrews 4:15)
~Andrew Peterson
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