The Infirmary

It isn't easy to be sick or broken.  So often the well look on the sick or the hurt like they are so fortunate to be given such attention.  The point that is missed is they need that attention to get well again.  Logical, right?  There is nothing glamorous about being broken in spirit either.

Healing is a process, and it gets messy.  Realistically, no one comes to the Lord well.  Not really.  All who come to the well are in need of healing water.  Some more than others, some sooner than others. Yet all needs are important.  Still further, all needs give us time to better understand our creator and his purposes.

When a sheep, usually a very young one, or goat, or whatever, is willful and keeps on wandering off and getting lost so the herder has to keep going and finding it, what happens, well what use to happen, was the Shepard would take and break one of the legs of the wanderer, then reset it.  Then, as this painting depicts, he would place the sheep around his neck.

What this did was create a dependance.  The sheep would grow so use and comfortable with the Shepard, and it would come to depend on him(her) for feeding, and get use to being fed by hand, the relationship would become such a bond and such a need that when the leg was healed that sheep would no longer stray.  Archaic, right?  I don't really agree any more.

A sheep who would stray would find themselves a lion or wolf to contend with.  They would often wind up dead as a result.  Granted the sheep in this case ends up dead anyway in most instances.  Depending on the purpose of the Shepard and their family.  Still, the point remains.  When we are prideful, when we get ahead of the Father, when we try too hard to get off on our own, there is need.  In this case the reason for the broken leg isn't really the Shepard.  Its our own fault, and possibly someone else's, or even the devil's, or all three or combination thereof.

We need to understand that it is not God who caused the brokenness.  God allows it, but we also have to learn, to understand and realize, that the chances are pretty good He sent more than one opportunity to turn away.  By letting us go pellmell into it, He merely respected our wishes.  When teenagers rebel, we can only stand in the way so long.  If we can't reach them, we can't stop them.  Not all the time.  The result is sometimes broken limbs... or egos.  Or what have you.

Ultimately, we really sort of do a lot of the damage to ourselves.  Sometimes it is done to us by outside forces.  That is real.  Loosing a loved one, getting abused as a child, having a crime committed against you, in many cases these things are things that are done and we have little or no control.  That is very real.  How we choose to deal with it after that is a different story.

Long story short, we have choices and we make choices.  How we choose to deal with things matters.

At last, we are brought to the end of ourselves and the end of whatever we have left, and if we haven't managed to mortally wound ourselves in the process we find ourselves in such a way as to need a sort of doctor.  THE Doctor.  And I don't been like on the BBC.

Moving on.

Here's the the away I'm driving at, folks:  We get broken.  The way this world is, it happens.  Some of it we do to our selves, some of it is done to us.  Some times what get's done to us is the result of poor choices putting us there, sure, but still, ignorance doesn't necessarily mean we deserve what happened.  It's easy to blame.  Often it's even easy to feel guilt when we didn't do anything wrong.  To grasp at a sense of control we cling to ideas of how and why we should have known better when the reality is we just didn't at the time and we must let go.

All of this leads back to one solid fact.  If you are in the infirmary, if you are at that point now where you have tried it your way and you're so broken that you are just down and waiting for God,  you're just on your knees and there's no where to go any more, its time to dig into the books.

This time of being broken, this time of healing, it is a time to know your Creator.  God has a character and a posture toward us.  God has all manner of things to share with us.  We learn so much about Him and who He is through the Word.  Through teachings from people out there calling out to us of the Love of the Father.  For any of us that are in hospital right now, it is time for us to dig into all the Bible and come to understand.

I hope very much to follow this with probably a few posts about the nature of God.  Old testament God and New Testament God.  Its so important to understand that this is the same God we are looking at.  And learning to read it and understand the why of it all is so important.  There is a lot of ground to cover.  So have patients with me as I forge ahead into the next set of entries.  I wish to encourage and I hope that it isn't too long in the coming.  Its going to take some time to plan, and to write it all out.  It is a LARGE topic to cover...