Finding God In The RuinsSample

Violated

God watches us squirm. I don’t know if I will ever get used to it. I think of the atrocities of this world – ten year old Indian girls being sexually violated time and time again in the brothels of Mumbai, and I know God sees it happen, but also that he doesn’t intervene in the way that I would – that any of us would. When I sent God away, I wanted to know what was happening in the heavenly realms when life was brutalizing his children. I pictured God in Indian brothels, staring on. I imagined him leaning against the laundry machine in my basement, seeing all of it. In brothels and basements, I knew he was there. But what was he doing if not intervening?

“My bones are shifting in my skin, and you, my love, are gone.”

While writing this book, I sent an earlier portion of the manuscript to a good friend of mine. In chapter four I had written this statement:
”He participated in their horrors by being present.” This is what he sent back to me.

“Where is God? He is hanging there on the gallows. He’s not just in the brothel with the girl being violated, He IS being violated.”

He IS being violated.

I let the thought sink deeply into me. And for the first time in my life the crucified God looked different to me. He wasn’t watching, he was receiving. Before this moment I only had compassion for God on the Friday he was executed. That was the day his human rights were violated. But now I was faced with the idea of his crucifixion being stretched out until the end of time – that in every abysmal crime against us, every suicide, every abuse, every murder, rape, and every addiction, God himself was being violated.

God wasn’t staring on in the brothels of Mumbai, he was stuck on a dirty floor with a pedophile on top of him. And he wasn’t leaning against the laundry machine in my basement, he was being pierced, crushed, bruised, and wounded so eventually I could be healed. It happened to him every time it happened to me. It was him, the same as it was me.

Was it possible that God needed my compassion? Was it true that all of our sufferings combined were the total weight of God’s sufferings?

Is this what is meant by the weight of glory?

If we were abused, then so was he. If we were orphaned, then he was too. All of a sudden I wanted to reach out to God – to take care of him. He had been broken and abused the same as I – violated by his own family, left behind to suffer and then die.

I no longer wanted him out in the cold. I only wanted him back inside the warmth of my heart.

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