Joining Lives

I am thinking this morning about the joining of lives. About how true the statement made by sixteenth century poet and minister John Donne is. Donne wrote while struggling to recover from a long and debilitating illness which he had originally thought was the Black Plague. Each day he would lie in his bed and listen to the tolling of the church bells nearby, signaling the death of yet another person from plague. His words are potent, the entire Meditation XVII worth reading for it's power and strength (you can find the whole thing here), but I will quote for you just a tiny portion, the most famous portion:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

My life is inherently tied to the lives of those around me. I am only beginning to realize the depth of what this means. I am only beginning to understand how to walk out life as an individual, but as an individual who is tied to others with varying degrees of closeness and strength. On November 1st, 2005, God healed me from depression that had plagued me for over five years. On that same day, as one of the things that led up to the prayer time where I later realized I was healed, I began to have flashes of a vision. The same thing over and over again. Two small feet, looking like they had been slashed with a razor blade. (the word razor was very strongly associated in my head with what I was seeing.) The wounds weren't bleeding, they were more like scratches, or healing wounds, but they were fairly fresh and raw. Later, I discovered that God was using that moment of healing to tie my life to another person. The feet were those of a friend who struggles with self-mutilation, and on the day that I was so oddly "seeing" feet all day, she was using a razor blade on her own feet and ankles, expressing the pain in her life in the manor that I had been viewing all day long.

I am only now, six months later, beginning to fully understand that moment. God asked me to serve a couple of very broken women within days of healing part of my own brokenness. And I poured myself into that service with abandon. I had little wisdom to offer, little experience of deeper spiritual things, but I understood what it was to be broken and to desire wholeness. Fast forward six months. There have been ups and downs. This week was particularly down. I had seen little progress in the lives of one of the women in particular. In fact, it seemed she was further away from emotional and spiritual health rather than closer to it. I am involved in another situation that has also drained a great deal of my emotional and spiritual energy. This week I screamed at God because I know deep within me that He has not released me from the ties that bind me to these situations. That He is still calling me to be present in these situations, to continue to offer myself. I had lost all perspective. I was carrying to some extent the burden on my own, rather than allowing Christ to carry it, and simply being obedient to His calling.

I am regaining perspective today. I woke and read this post at Kirk's blog. He describes a vision of a wounded Jesus. The way He describes the wounds of Christ was an accurate description of the wounds I saw on those feet all those months ago. Not just the feet of my friend, but the wounded feet of a Savior who bears all of our wounds...

I was already thinking about the joining of lives because I am going to a wedding this afternoon to watch two very dear friends make the deepest joining of their lives possible. I am so excited for these people that God has already brought together, to watch them stand before their family and friends and God and commit themselves to each other for the rest of their breathing moments.

I am thinking about a situation I heard about this week where it was discovered that a little girl was being sexually abused. I am thinking about how, when the situation was shared with a group of us, our cries to Jesus on behalf of this child and her family were passionate - we knew inherently the evil, that it diminished us, though we would have never known to use those words, and we fought against it on behalf of this child and her family.

I come back, as I draw this post to a close to another portion of Donne's meditation. He is again talking about death, but I find his thoughts so applicable to a life of faith...

...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another...

May all the situations of our lives, the wounds and brokenness, the joyous moments such as weddings, and the realization of our ties to those around us serve to begin the translation process. May we be translated in small portions each day into a "better language". May the events of our lives be translators employed by the hands of God, and in that moment of final translation may His hand truly bind up all our scattered pages.