Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Healing at the Foot of the Cross

Francesca Battistelli’s song, If We’re Honest, is an anthem about our humanity speaking of a resplendent healing only as far away as the foot of the cross.
We’re called to gather there; to admit, “I’m a mess and so are you.”
We have built walls that nobody can get through.  But if we bring our own brokenness, by admitting our struggles, trusting that spiritual tempest in the safety God’s provided at the cross, we gather in the unity of our vulnerability.  By those stripes of rare bareness we’re healed.
That’s church; knelt, heartfelt, indwelt, cushioned by grace and not crushed by our burden, at the foot of the cross.
“Love heals that hurt that divides,” and in recognising that we sense that holding onto the baggage of past is a secret we were never meant to keep.  Only as we let it go, letting it mingle into the community of misgiving, do we find redemption in the land of the living.
Trust is what makes safety possible, but our intuition believes it’s the other way around.  We hide our hurts, thinking we’re alone.  Yet it’s only in our hurts that we’re connected, accessing there the love that’s balms and binds those wounds, which is a love available only at the foot of the cross.
By our hurts we gather, in need of His healing as individuals within a collective, to be renovated by the outworking of His grace.
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Let us gather, be vulnerable together, seek Him and trust Him, to be healed at the foot of the cross.
Mercy awaits us on the other side of the cross, but we must seek Him by going there.
Only as we arrive at the cross do we see the multitude making the same pilgrimage of need.  If we’re honest, then we know just how much we need Him, and only then are we granted vision of others’ in their perplexing need.
Healing at the foot of the cross is license and liberty to become the most accepted version of who we are.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

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