No One

"I'm gonna find someone, someday, who might actually treat me well".

Taylor Swift - White Horse.

This week, a mother killed herself and her disabled child in a car fire after enduring almost ten years of continuous bullying and intimidation by a local gang of youths.
Fiona Pilkington had called the police to intervene in this matter many times, but nothing was ever done.

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of this kind of cruelty (and I have) knows how soul destroying just a few incidents, never mind a decades worth can be, but why, why, was the only way out for this poor woman to take her own life? Why do we continue to live in a world so scarred by the vile cruelty that one person can inflict upon another?

It stems from not loosing, but clinging to our own religion - the one we garbed ourselves with once we'd rebelled. The immediate consequence of our fall was that we were entirely and totally naked, not just outwardly, but at our very core, and so, because of that horror, we are inherently crooked and divorced when it comes to any form of true intercourse with our world, our neighbor, and especially our Creator, as well as ourselves. In every way, the beauty of the intimacy that was to mark us as being made in God's image has become torn and lacerated, so the natural reaction is to react selfishly, cruelly, towards anyone or anything we deem 'dangerous'... an image of the better creatures we are meant to be.

The flip side of this pain is the need to be what we should be, to know genuine warmth, love and care - to move towards a genuine intimacy in life, and that can often seem so beyond us; an empty dream in a broken world.

Within all the ugly mess, there is hope, for there is a healer, and that person is Jesus Christ.
His broken body, His cruel and ugly death, His giving of Himself, was God bringing genuine,
redeeming love back into our darkness and despair,
to lift eyes, given new sight, to see a day when this broken thing is healed,
and the connection, the beauty, we so deeply crave, will be the reality of heaven and earth.

Beyond all the pain, there's a new day coming.