|
What images do these words conjure for you?
Abandoned
Deserted
Discarded
Forsaken
Alone
Whatever impressions emerged or pictures were drawn in your mind as
you thought of these words, it is likely that you have also
experienced the feelings, the emotions, yes, the hurt and pain of
abandonment or rejection.
Perhaps it was a parent – a mother or a father who abandoned you.
Maybe it was a spouse or a child or a brother or
sister who rejected you. Those you believed were your friends
forsook you and you found yourself suddenly and silently alone in
your aloneness, shivering in the icy chill of your isolation.
Rejection and abandonment can come in a thousand costumes and speak
with myriad voices. The effect, the result produced is always the
same:
Rejection brings injury to the soul and anguish to the mind.
Abandonment makes the heart grow weak, but more;
desertion destroys self-worth. We learn early in life to discard
what we do not need; what we do not want; what is not essential or
profitable or useful or even acceptable.
Garbage is disposed of; trash is discarded. We keep only that to
which we attach value.
An
abandoned soul feels valueless, worthless, insignificant, useless.
A
forsaken heart is more than empty and crushed and bruised and
injured; it is a playground for devils, a gymnasium
for demons, a potential abode for the citizens of hell.
From the soil of rejection flourish the sour fruits of bitterness,
resentment and, dark, brewing rage. Implacable, stone-hearted and
pitiless wrath proceed from hearts that have known the frigid winds
of torment spawned by the uncaring,
the unfeeling and the unaware.
From such renunciation Americans have become familiar with the name
“Columbine” and are now becoming aware of “Red
Lake High” in northern Minnesota.
Most rejected and broken-hearted people never pick up a gun or seek
to lash out at others. There is no need and no desire. The slow,
grinding suicide begun by the deadly injection of aloneness and
friendlessness is as deadly as any bullet that ever
roared in tortured anguish.
We
cannot control if and when or by whom we will feel the lethal claws
of abandonment.
What we can do, what we wield control over is our response to
rejection. Options exist for the heart that was crushed. Brokenness
may come, but annihilation is not inevitable. No soul that was
crushed was ever beyond repair.
And
there is Someone who knows.....feels.....
empathizes.....understands..... cares and Who also possesses the
power to heal even the most trodden and crushed heart. It was
foretold of Him;
“I have put My Spirit upon Him; He will bring forth justice....He
will not cry out, nor raise His voice, Nor cause His voice to be
heard in the street. A bruised reed He will not break, and smoking
flax He will not quench.”
Who
is this shining Knight; this Rescuer of offended hearts? Who is this
Champion of the soul Who comes to right
those who were wronged and to heal those who’s destruction seemed
certain?
He
came forth of misinterpreted illegitimacy and was raised in humble
anonymity; He came forth from obscurity and moved
about in lonely exile. He left His home country and renounced his
nobility, He was self-effacing and pointedly unassuming. He
sought nothing for Himself and was content by Himself.
He was “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he
was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
It
is He Who
“will bring forth justice for truth,” and God will hold His
hand; “He will keep You and give You as a
covenant to the people, as a light to the Gentiles to open blind
eyes, to bring out prisoners from the prison, those
who sit in darkness from the prison house.”
And
to the One Who promised, “I will hold Your hand” hear the anguished
cry from the central cross on that
Crucifixion Day of all Days when Innocence was fixed to the Tree of
Final Death: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
“Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him....” because He saw
your face and knew your brokenness and He
anticipated through forsaking Him, your wholeness.
This Man above men, “made Himself of no reputation, taking the
form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness
of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He
humbled Himself and became obedient to the point
of death, even the death of the cross” So that He might see you,
find you, know you, touch you, heal you, a bruised
reed, tender, delicate, nearly too far gone to be repaired, but
repairable in the Hands of a Master Physician.
And when we – you and I – accept and receive
healing and restoration and the comfort of friendship with Him, we
then carry within ourselves the knowledge, the ability and the
sympathy to carry Him to another abandoned, rejected,
forgotten heart, “that we may be
able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with
which we ourselves are
comforted by God.”
So,
we reach to the
“least of these.” We find ourselves among “orphans and
widows.” We observe pure religion and undefiled before God
because we become what He has always been; a Father to the
fatherless; a Lover of the
unlovely; a Friend to the friendless. A visitor of prisoners and a
provider of a cloak, a meal, a home...a heart that
knows, that feels, that sees, that understands.
Our
Abandonment was essential for another’s Recovery
We were deserted so that
we might learn to Salvage
Discarded so we could Recapture
Forsaken that we might Comprehend
Alone that we might find the true Companion
What images are conjured in your heart? What scenes play before your
mindscreen? Someone has been abandoned, deserted, discarded,
forsaken. And who will notice? Who will go? Who will touch them in
their brokenness and in their loneliness and Who will bring them to
the Forsaken One Who alone has the antidote for this poison of the
soul?
In
the Shelter of His Grace,
greg |
