Our pain magnified

I have a tendency to avoid people.

I wouldn’t call it social anxiety, shyness, or self-consciousness, really. The sight of another person doesn’t induce panic throughout my nervous system. The more I live the more I actually come to love people—their complexities, their quirks. I love that they are, like me, flawed yet loved unconditionally by God.

That’s where I run into a problem, I think. People are flawed. And they will hurt you, purposefully and by accident, especially if you love them. So sometimes it’s easier to let them flow through your peripherals.

Care for no one, and they will never be able to hurt you. Love everyone, and you’ve basically given them all a clear shot at your heart. Because I have been loved and saved by God, I bear that love for those around me and want nothing more than to share it. But nothing cuts deeper than the inability to express the love of Christ to others fully and make them believe it, and watching them struggle without it.

This reality struck me pretty squarely recently when I serendipitously met two of my close friends while I was out walking. Truthfully, I considered avoiding them in my desire to brood on my own thoughts. I wasn’t ready for the news that they would share with me, which contained truly painful revelations about some of our mutual acquaintances. I left our conversation inexpressibly saddened by my new knowledge of our friends’ struggles and my own complete helplessness to address the problem. I continued my walk in turmoil, trying to wrap my mind around the seemingly impossible task of relinquishing my anxiety for them to God.

But one moment it hit me: the love I have for these people—the love that causes me to weep openly and despair when I hear of their pain—is but a minuscule reflection of the love that God has for every one of us, and a blurry one at that. I cried aloud in pain because of the suffering I saw in these two people’s lives, pain of which I could only see one dimension.

How much more acutely must God feel that despair, having such a minute and intricate view of everyone’s hearts.

But God never avoids us. In fact, He eagerly approaches us, offering us His own perfect and beautiful heart for the breaking. When Jesus came to the world, he took all the sin and death in it onto his own shoulders, determined to crucify it alongside himself.

Take a moment to impress on your mind the magnitude of that statement. He bore all the sin. All the hate, slander, anger, lies. All the death. All the loss, grief, confusion, sorrow.

All of it, from now until the end of time, was compressed into that single moment of Christ’s death on the cross.

I am so small, and I can scarcely bear my own struggles, let alone the burdens I accumulate by loving others. And yet the God I know is somehow tremendous enough, loving enough, courageous enough, merciful enough, to take not just my pain but everyone else’s and say, “Let me carry this so you won’t have to.”

Because that’s what He really wants. To take care of us.

God is at once present in this moment with you, understanding your precise struggles, and present in the same way with every other person on the planet. Our joys are his joys—multiplied. His pain is all our individual pains—magnified. What a God He is, who created us, knowing we would cause him such pain, yet loving us enough to endure all of it in the hopes that He would one day reach us.