A God Who Suffers With Me

This time of year, I delight in the dogwoods a bloom and watching little ones with their Easter baskets in tow.  And, my thoughts go to God's love for mankind. The story of Christ's resurrection is as beloved to me as the story of his birth. 

Artwork depicting The Crucifixion, however, is hard to take.  The same goes for plays and films. I don't ponder well the brutality of the cross.  I admit to covering or averting my eyes when the images are before me.

Pictures of the empty cross caressed with Easter Lilies are more my speed.

Yet, I need to be reminded that the wages of sin is death.  It brought great suffering for God my Savior.

The book of Isaiah, specifically Chapter 53, speaks of the one who would take our sins, weaknesses, and sorrows, and bear them as his own.  It was his mission, his job so to speak, to bring fallen mankind back into right relationship with God.

I'm not gifted enough to grasp let alone put into words all this means. 

However, Jodi McCullah, does so very profoundly in The Beginning of Healing as published in the March/April 2011 edition of Alive Now.  

She writes, in part:

"I was the victim of sexual violence as a child.  And, while tears may be the language of the soul, I spent a great deal of energy trying to avoid tears because I could not imagine how, once the tears started, they would ever stop.  We are promised that when our tears are turned toward God, they are not wasted or in vain.  Psalm 56:8 even says that God keeps them in a bottle and writes each one in a book.  If that's the case, then God has lots of bottles and books with my name on them; and more bottles and books for all the children on this earth whose bodies also have been broken.  

Decades after my abuse, my first sense of God's presence came as I allowed the words of Isaiah 53 to sink into my damaged body.   It is the image of the suffering servant--in Christ on the cross--that I see God being violated, bloodied, battered and molested.  Christ suffers with every child who suffers, cries out with every mother whose child is sacrificed for someone else's need for power.

On the cross--where God is inconsolably crying with me--is where I find the beginning of healing . . . a God who suffers with me, who is inconsolable with me, is a God I can trust again, not to protect me from harm but rather to be with me in all that happens."

Jodi McCullah's testimony touches me soul-deep. I read it often.

Her words help me understand the brutality of the cross; to more fully see its purpose.

God my Savior was battered and abused, not just for the penalty of sin but so that healing may come to those who have been so battered and abused by the sinner.

The depth of this is hard to grasp. Yet, it gives me hope that those who are so abused, especially any of the little ones scurrying around with their Easter baskets, may find this place of healing that Jodi has found.

And so, I will look this year and watch with purpose, and with hope, and with deep, deep gratitude for a God who suffers with me.



Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows . . .
He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement of our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed. 
--Isaiah 53:4,5 (NKJV) 

Jodi McCullah's words are used here with permission.


Visit the devotional magazine Alive Now at www.alivenow.org