My heart skipped a beat as I heard her hands desperately scraping along the wall, attempting to break her fall.
A sudden harsh discordant mixture of sounds followed, as flesh and bone violently collided with wood and tile. No scream, just a rush of air from her lungs.
As I ran out into the hall, she was face down on the floor, legs and arms splayed crazily, her twisted expression reflecting the shock of being flipped from vertical to horizontal, like an oblivious quarterback blindsided by a sadistic linebacker.
No tears, more like anger mixed with a renewed sense of personal vulnerability.
Her Parkinson’s disease was slowly assuming control of her body, rendering her helpless to resist. Periodic falls brutally reminded her that she could no longer trust her own sense of balance.
As I knelt beside her to check for scrapes, cuts or broken bones (God forbid), I looked into her eyes and instantly felt her pain, fear, embarrassment as though they were my own. This formerly statuesque, brilliant, dignified beauty found herself strewn on the floor like a discarded rag doll.
What shocked me was my own gut reaction ...
It was as though this whole thing was happening to me. I was no longer a separate person coming to her rescue — I was so identified with her, that her pain was my pain, her fear was my fear, her peril was my peril.
I have never known such intimacy, such closeness and at the same time, such helplessness to save her.
In that moment, I realized what real love is — God love — it’s being so identified with the pain of a loved one that their pain morphs physically and emotionally into my pain.
Suddenly, familiar scriptures flooded my mind, but with renewed impact, as in John 11:33-37:
“Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled, and He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to Him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus wept.”
There He was, God of the universe, becoming so identified with the death of his friend, Lazarus of Bethany, and the resultant grief of Mary and Martha that “JESUS WEPT.”
It was this personal, searing identification with everyone’s pain and sin that drove Him to, as described in Philippians 2:5-8, “set aside the privileges of deity and take on the status of a slave, became human! ... He lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death — and the worst kind of death at that — a crucifixion.”
Jesus could have stayed in heaven, comfortably removed from the mess we humans had made for ourselves. But He was too identified, having lovingly formed us with His own hands and brought us to life with His own breath in the Garden of Eden at creation.
Such intimacy would eventually cost Him dearly ... Hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth the Old Testament prophet Isaiah predicted the coming Jewish Messiah (Jesus) would suffer for His people, as written in Isaiah 53:4-5:
“However, it was our sicknesses that He Himself bore,
And our pains that He carried;
He was crushed for our wrongdoings;
The punishment for our well-being was laid upon Him,
And by His wounds we are healed.”
C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, The Four Loves, “True love is a very risky business. There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken ... If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.”
How About You?
And just as I peered lovingly but helplessly into my wife’s eyes as she lay on the floor, so Jesus peers into your eyes and feels what you are feeling WITH YOU. As it is written in Hebrews 4:14-16:
“For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things just as we are, yet without sin. Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace for help at the time of our need.”
But Jesus went further than I could ever imagine as I stood by helplessly. He did something about our underlying problem, “He (God the Father) made Him who knew no sin (Jesus) to be sin in our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
Now that’s God’s kind of love.
— D.C. Collier is a Bible teacher, discipleship mentor and writer focused on Christian apologetics. A mechanical engineer and Internet entrepreneur, he is the author of My Origin, My Destiny, a book focused on Christianity’s basic “value proposition.” Click here for more information, or contact him at [email protected]. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
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