We have several in our faith community who are quite ill this week. Thinking about these great folk, one has to wonder what God had in mind.
Phil Yancey is a remarkable writer, several of our groups have studied his books. In one of his best, The Jesus I Never Knew, he writes of Jesus’ reaction to illness and suffering. He wrote of how Jesus wished to be remembered by us and all of mankind…Presumably [Jesus] could have had any resurrected body he wanted, and yet he chose one identifiable mainly by scars that could be seen and touched. Why? When human beings fantasize, we dream of pearly straight teeth and wrinkle-free skin and sexy ideal shapes. We dream of an unnatural state: the perfect body. But for Jesus, being confined in a skeleton and human skin WAS the unnatural state. The scars are, to him, an emblem of life on our planet, a permanent reminder of those days of confinement and suffering.
There’s an old saying, “To live is to suffer.” That’s kind of a downer, but life is easier if we don’t have false expectations. The good part is, for those who are following Christ, we have the capacity to cope.
C.S. Lewis put it this way, “God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.”
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