Christ Is With Us

Tonight's City Rescue Mission group consisted of a couple with five kids and two single men (including me). We talked about events we experienced as kids that produced woundedness in us that we're still recovering from today. The married man shared how his mom severely abused him physically and how, as a result, he has problems disciplining his kids. Disciplining his kids feels, to him, like he's abusing them.

This led us to talk about how our tendency is to try and "control" a situation like this by doing the opposite of what we encountered as kids. But, this seems to make us wind up in yet another "bad" place. I shared how I saw this playing out in my own life and how I discovered that moving to an opposite extreme--or even finding a "happy medium"--is not the solution. The solution is to discover the Third Way.

The Third Way is the solution Jesus provides as we accept our brokenness and take it to Him. Sometimes we feel like we're in a small room, without any doors or windows--there's no way in and no way out; we're trapped. But if we open up to Jesus in that place, we enter into Him and He into us. And He becomes the way--the Third Way.

As my friends and I shared tonight about how Christ is filling in and patching up the broken places of our hearts, I realized that He was really and truly present, right there with us. The single man I've known for only three weeks, and the couple I just met tonight. But it felt like we shared a deep, rich family bond. The single man was aware of this, too, and expressed as much.

We were sitting in a tight little circle. The center looked empty. But Christ was there with us, healing us, uniting us. And everyone of us in that room knew it, deep in our bones.