August 2024
Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
These are the words that Jesus cried out after six hours on the cross and three hours after darkness had covered the land (Mark 15: 33-34, Matthew 27: 45-47). They are words that came to me when I made the unfortunate mistake of Googling the prognosis for the type of colon cancer initial findings before a biopsy had been performed on a mass in my wife’s colon. (whatever you do, do not Google anything in the moment where you have more emotion than information)
At the beginning of this journey with my wife, I felt the very real, awful, gut-wrenching, tangible pain of what could be. At the time, there was no way for me to know what would be. Almost one year to the day after this, I am sitting in front of a computer screen reliving a moment where I felt all hope was lost, that there were no longer options, and desperately trying to avoid considering a life without the person who has stood faithfully beside me for 25 years. In that moment, I felt a very real darkness, fear, and desperation that caused me to think about the moment when Jesus asked why he had been forsaken. My rudimentary understanding of that moment in time was more about the sentiment in Jesus’ words than of what, in fact, was likely behind them. He had suffered on that cross for six hours, three of them in darkness. Those three hours, for me, are symbolic of the darkness within the world. A darkness that represented all of the negativity within the human spirit. Within those three hours, He consumed, possessed, embraced and accepted all of our sins so that we may be saved. It is no wonder that three hours of darkness which represented all of the evil of mankind, he cried out and questioned God. While it was certainly not an immediate realization, I gradually came to consider the idea that He had to endure–the torment of not only the physical pain of the crucifixion, but the agony of enveloping all humanity’s sin in order to be in Heaven and to deliver us all. And as difficult as it was at the time, it was this small silver lining that I clung to. He had to endure the Darkness (sin) in order to see the Light (God). I started to understand that he was not, in fact, questioning His Father’s path for him, he was instead making the path known to us all, reminding us that our lives will not be perfect and that there will be darkness, but that in order to see light, we must live through the darkness.
If you are reading this because you may be on a similar path, it is so incredibly important to believe that our paths will all have darkness because they all lead to light.
Humilitive 