When the difficulties of life “cocoon” us and wrap us tightly in their hurt, their pain, and even their “unfairness,” those difficulties span the tragic, the violent, and the senseless. If we could unwrap our arms, perhaps we could reach beyond the hurt, but we can’t. Our look is inward, our thinking is dark, and any perspective apart from the one that is suffocating us, is incomprehensible. To be reminded that God has purpose even in the senseless or to be “comforted” with the hope of eternity or to be challenged to a greater faith, free from questions and doubt, secure in the God who has everything “under control,” brings all too often a sense of being judged or finding little in the way of acceptance or understanding. Being cocooned thwarts any forward mobility and isolates us from the God who is spoken of in almost mechanical terms, and yet, for those who have truly experienced Him, theirs is a testimony of passionate dependence able to unravel another’s cocoon in ways nothing else can.
Melanie stood before the conference room filled with moms whose lives had known the emptiness and despair of the death of a child that is sooo capable of cocooning. Her first words challenged to deliverance from the darkness of sorrow, a deliverance Jesus wanted to give to each mom, on whatever calendar was His plan for that mom. Empty words? Learned, repetitive, mechanical words? Religious sounding words that knew nothing of reality? Melanie had only begun, and as she continued, she unfolded her own testimony of passionate dependence on the God she personally had known and still knew, who had met her in the stench and turmoil of the tragic, the violent, and the senseless. Broken by the murders of her mother, her sister, and later, her husband, and then her child, and her personhood scarred by molestation, she found her own deliverance as God miraculously touched her life with His grace, and God took a woman who had every “right” to be cocooned, and gave her the freedom to reach beyond her circumstances to impact the lives of others. Through their tears, those who listened in that conference room fully recognized the compassion, the tenderness, and the transforming power of the God who never forgets us, never abandons us, never stops loving, and never stops giving. And in the solemn stillness of that room, moms let God unravel their cocoons.
Silk has been described as “one of earth’s most amazing and beautiful fibers.” It is a beauty that is drawn when the cocoon is unraveled. There is a beauty God wants to create when He unravels the cocoon imposed by tragedy, violence, and senselessness. But so often that unraveling will only begin when one who has truly experienced God in her own hurt or her own pain, is willing to speak personally and passionately of the reality of His transforming grace.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: Psalm 18:1-6,16-19)
