Russell A. Cardwell Online

We are the lost, the children of Adam and Eve,
groping for light in this dark, this fallen world.
We are a tough people, thick of skin and hard of shell.
For our own protection, we must be so.
But the very armor that protects us from the sins of this world
also shields us from the love of God which is in Christ.

Yet no armor is perfect: there are chinks.
Sooner or later, by chance, design, or circumstance,
someone finds those chinks and wounds us through them.
We are all of us wounded,
we are all of us scarred,
we are all of us broken,
battered,
bruised.

Our wounds are the openings through which Christ enters.
The love of God that is in Christ Jesus can only enter into us
through our brokenness,
through our woundedness.
Christ enters through those openings and inhabits those scars,
those bruises, those wounds.
He takes our wounds upon himself—
Our wounds become his wounds.

And only through our woundedness,
only through those openings created by our woundedness
do we become whole,
can become healed,
can we be restored to community
with God and with one another.

He is the healer of the brokenhearted. He is the one who bandages their wounds.
-Psalms 147:3

He certainly has taken upon himself our suffering and carried our sorrows, but we thought that God had wounded him, beat him, and punished him. He was wounded for our rebellious acts. He was crushed for our sins. He was punished so that we could have peace, and we received healing from his wounds.
-Isaiah 53:4-5

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