Blog 2303 – 02.11.2022

Invulnerable, But Also Fragile

We are as Jesus was in this world both divine and human, super heroic, but also so very fragile. We are full of contradictions holy and whole, but also sinful, impure, and so damaged and broken. I recall a dear older lady who had several addictions and had made more than a few missteps in her life saying to me once, “We are all sick puppies.” I believe she was right.

It is the weakness and brokenness of our least and lowest self that points unfailingly to our best and highest self. I recently modified one of the Bible phrases that I have borrowed for my daily mantra after reading how one modern translation rendered the verse: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” I had already changed the “Thy” to “my,” but the newer translation rendered “my strength and my redeemer” as “my rock and my redeemer.” I like that better. There was a song that we sang in church when I was a boy that went, “O, Rock of Ages, hide Thou me” and another, “In the cleft of the rock let me hide.”

At his most fragile when Jesus appeared most battered and broken our Higher Self showed himself/herself to be the most loving. “O , Love, that will not let me go, I rest my soul in Thee.”

The story is told of a missionary who laborer many years on the foreign mission field and had utterly failed for all his preaching on the love of God to win a single soul till disease took his wife and children and as he wept bitterly and loudly over their graves, the people he had labored so long to win saw that he was weak and fragile just like them and were persuaded that his God was as real as he was real.

Paul wrote, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency might be of the God.” It is the cracked and broken parts of these earthen vessels (clay pots) that most reveal the divine light that dwells in is all.

The invulnerable had to show him/herself vulnerable, fragile to reveal that cleft in the rock that is our eternal hiding place, our Rock and our Redeemer.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O9TSiE35PKzupP8NjHY7QDRKHN4HWngE/view?usp=drivesdk

Never Enough