​

 Wholeness

​

​

​

Winter seasons are hard.  Gray skies hover overhead, plans in a balance with snow and ice covered roads.  Relationships are hard. Most every moment, someone feels as if they finally fit in, yet someone else feels left out.  Pressures of life are hard. Always more to do, to give, to be. In an effort to ease the difficulty, we look for an easy out.  Move. Switch friend groups. Change jobs. Once in a while, it helps. Still, life is hard. Social injustice, a turn of health, natural disasters, death.  You can take your kids out of school, you can take yourself out of a winter climate but ultimately you cannot take the brokenness out of life.

 

Even when Jesus came He did not take away the brokenness, indeed He Himself was broken.  Our hope is not in fixing the brokenness, or in God fixing the brokenness the way we would like Him too.  Our hope is in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He alone bridges the gap between our brokenness and the wholeness of God.  

 

I wonder how many times this week I have tried to build my own bridge to lesson the gap, tried to manage relationships and life’s pressures or prayed for circumstances to change.  I wonder how I can learn to take my eyes off the gap (which has already been bridged) and instead rejoice that I will live in wholeness someday. Even today I can rise above the brokenness by communion with the One who has never been less than whole.   

 

Life on earth is broken, and this is hard.  But new life found through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is unbroken.  The certainty of our future wholeness is as real as the broken circumstances we find ourselves in today.

 

We pray to our Father and ask for seasons to change, for relationships to be healed, for circumstances to improve.  Of course we do, to Whom else can we turn? Yet in our communion may we not forget to thank Him for the eternal wholeness we shall someday step into fully.  Like Paul, may we pray in the midst of brokenness, to know and embrace the reality of our wholeness in Christ.

 

​

“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith- that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Ephesians 3:14-19 (ESV)