Job LXI

I can’t say I’ve ever been so low as to curse the day I was born. Job was. It’s easy to sit in judgment and find reasons to look down on the man or say he was being overly dramatic, but if you’ve never walked a mile in someone’s shoes, then your judgment is unfounded. I can’t quantify another’s pain, nor can you quantify mine. It is relational to me alone, and only God knows it fully. Each of us carries a unique burden of pain, a weight only we and God can truly understand.

Sometimes, a man’s countenance and what’s going on in his heart are two wholly different things. It’s guaranteed that you’ve run across someone who put on a brave face and smiled at you while their heart was in turmoil, a vortex of grief and pain that had you seen, you would have recoiled from. On occasion, you get the sense of it, whether it’s a look in their eyes or the fact that the smile is contrary to their overall countenance, but more often than not, we ignore it because we all have our own problems, our own grief, our own disappointments in life, and we’ve been conditioned to turn off our empathy for those around us while expecting them to show it at the slightest need.

No man is an island, but those who deem themselves the overlords of molding society would love nothing more. It’s easier to control someone who has no tribe, no friends, no one they can rely upon, confide in, or pour their hearts out to. They want to be the ones you run to, and they’re quick to offer you the drug cocktail du jour to numb you to the point of indifference toward everything that’s going on around you. Take this fistful of pills, and you won’t feel the grief anymore. Will it make it go away? No, it will still be there, but rather than dealing with it, going through it, letting time heal the wound, we’ll just numb all of you, and you’ll feel nothing at all. Of course, there’s a cost; there always is, and in this case, the cost is your lucidity, your self-awareness, your sense of purpose, and your peace.

Counterfeit peace or counterfeit joy are just that, counterfeit. They’re fake, they’re not real, and as soon as you run out of your prescription, the grief returns fivefold because it’s been building up with no pressure valve to release it and no true comfort to lessen it. What the world offers is not a cure but a way to manage it. The only one who can deliver on the promise of healing a broken heart is God, even if it takes time to do it. Wounds take time to heal. When you cut your finger, even if you wash out the wound, lather it in Neosporin, and bandage it, it won’t heal overnight, even though the healing process has already begun. You don’t go back to the wound, open it up, squeeze the sides, and make it bleed every few hours, wondering why it’s not healing. You do what you can do to keep it from getting infected, then let time do its thing and scab it over, then let it heal altogether, then when it’s done, you’ll have the scar to remind you of it for the rest of your days. Healing takes time, but it does come.

Scars remind us of the wounds we’ve suffered and the valleys God has carried us through. They’re a permanent reminder that God can bind up the wound and heal the broken heart because He’s already done it, and we carry the evidence of it with us throughout.

We tend to hide our scars, not realizing they make us who we are. Our scars are a testament to all that God has delivered us from, and they are not something to be ashamed or embarrassed of but rather something to showcase as evidence of His unwavering faithfulness.

Every scar I have directly correlates to an event in my life, whether for good or ill, depending on how I look at it, and each one is a constant reminder that though it wasn’t easy, God got me through it when everyone looking from the outside in had written me off already. This goes for spiritual scars as well as physical ones. Life is a tapestry of joy and pain, victories and defeats, times of plenty and times of famine, and each thread makes up a whole, a complete picture that, looking back on, one can clearly see the hand and providence of God throughout.

When you’re in the middle of the ocean, bobbing along on the waves, doing everything you can just to keep your head above water, it’s difficult to be introspective. You’re in survival mode, and everything you do is solely focused on staying alive. Eventually, after the lifeboat arrives and throws you a life preserver after you’re dragged on board, have a moment to catch your breath and know that you are safe, you get a chance to reflect and consider how much worse it could have been had the lifeboat not arrived when it did.

It’s only in our day and age that people turn around and sue individuals who save them from drowning or burning, citing that they were too rough in their efforts, but any rightly thinking, reasonable, logical individual would only show gratitude for having been saved, even if they got a bruise on their hip from being dragged into a boat, or out of a burning building.

Whenever God delivers you from a situation or a predicament you know full well you could have never delivered yourself from, the only attitude you should have is one of gratitude and thankfulness for His intervention. When I know that of my own accord, through my own strength, and by my own wisdom, I could not have navigated a situation satisfactorily, yet God intervened and made a way when there seemed to be none, anything less than me falling to my knees and thanking Him for His intervention is unseemly and less than He deserves. Gratitude is not just a feeling; it’s a way of acknowledging the divine intervention in our lives.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.