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My Healer.  Who is this man but everything?  The longer I walk, the more I understand.  Coming to Him as a twenty year old miserable sinner I knew Him as savior, but friends HE is always our savior in every way imaginable.

My Lord and my God, apart from Him we can do nothing!  I believe you’re my healer, Lord, and my portion, Jesus.

Twenty years later and He is the same savior, the same healer.  Over the last two decades I have been a collector of sin in various ways, only this time around much of the sin was not my own, but the sin of others.  Like an accumulation of pain and heartbreak.  From disappointments to private isolation, from betrayals to rejections.  An accumulation of weight and burden offering it up, always offering it up.  But the weight of it has felt much like my own sins–the weight, shame, even feelings of despair of life.

He came to me in brokenness at 20 over my sin, and I’m finding the same savior coming to me in my brokenness from the effects of sins committed against me.

He’s looking at me saying, “Steve, are you ready to receive the healing I have for you.  I healed you from within, are you willing to let me heal you from without?”

I look to Him and say, “Lord, so much pain, so much hurt!  I’m so broken.  I’m in so much pain, while hell circles around causing greater affliction.”

So I say, “Yes, Lord, come to me!  Heal my broken heart.  I have tried to bear it and I cannot.  I still need a savior!  Save me from my pain and despair.” And He comes to me, not to put together the broken jar, but thick oil comes and saturates the brokenness with His presence.

A Paradox of Christian holiness

He comes to the broken to heal.  They become little Christs and are rebroken as he was broken.  Then in the shattered journey of love, they have walked for love of Him.  He comes not to put the pieces back together, but simply rests within the pain of their private passions.

At the initial conversion, He comes to restore us from within making the image right again. The second breaking is fundamentally different; it is not from sin, but from love.  He doesn’t even want to take it away, rather, He desires not to remove the scars from His hands–that we might know Him and the power of His resurrection!  That we may somehow attain to the fellowship of His sufferings.  Suffering for love, this second brokenness is the mark of saints.  It is precious in the sight of God, and creates in us image, God’s image.

Only in sacrifice shall a world be saved, even through we who are called to the second breaking for love’s reward.

No greater love is this, that a man lay His life down for His friends.  All is not loss!  We are not alone.  Our Lord comes to our brokenness and enlivens us with perfect love that is pure, peaceable, and holy. It is free, it is sweetly broken next to the immaculate heart of Mary.

His intention for us–an immaculate conception of love.