His Face like Mine (eBook)

Finding God's Love in Our Wounds

Russell W. Joyce (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
IVP (Verlag)
978-1-5140-0909-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Have you ever tasted true freedom? Russell Joyce was born with a rare craniofacial disorder called Goldenhar syndrome, where the left side of his face was not formed. Years of patchwork surgeries made him more outwardly presentable, but not without deep pain and physical and emotional scars. But a life-changing encounter broke through to him with a power he never thought possible, in the very place he never thought to look-his broken face. This set Russell on a journey to understand what was hindering him and others from experiencing the power of God's grace and being truly set free. During a season of starting a new church in Brooklyn, New York, he learned how the broken places of our lives can be transformed when Jesus meets us in the realities of our woundedness. God doesn't love us despite our wounds but through those very wounds. By his scars we are healed, and we can find new depths of freedom in Christ, scars and all. A warning: this journey will not be easy. A promise: it will be well worth the risk.

Russell W. Joyce is the director of Foursquare Multiply, the church planting movement of the Foursquare denomination for the United States, while also serving as lead pastor of Faith Center, a historic church in the Foursquare movement. In 2017 he planted a church in Brooklyn, New York, with the Hope Church NYC family of churches before transitioning in 2021. He cohosts the Same Jesus Podcast and currently calls the Pacific Northwest home with his wife, Anna, and two sons.

Textauszug

One

The God
Who Kisses
Our Wounds

One night years back, my fiancée, Anna, and I were making out. She lived with six other women in a house in Portland, Oregon, and we found ourselves alone, which didn’t happen often. We decided to take advantage of the privacy. We were in our midtwenties, had been together for a year, were recently engaged, and swooning over each other. It was a happy season. In the middle of this moment, she suddenly pulled back.

“Stop that,” she said.

I was confused. I hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant. I hoped it wasn’t my kissing.

“Do you know you always do that?” she asked. “Every time I try and kiss the left side of your face, you don’t let me. You either pull my lips onto yours, or you start telling me you love me and how beautiful I am. You won’t just let me kiss you.”

I was stunned.

“Do you not think I see you?” she asked. “Like, all of you?”

I exhaled as if punched in the stomach. She continued, “Do you not think I love all of you? Let me kiss you.”

I sat dumbstruck, cut open by her words. I genuinely had no idea I was attempting to hide the “bad side” and making her kiss what I deemed to be the “good side.” I didn’t know how to respond or process what she had just revealed to me about myself. I was exposed without any explanation to offer.

“Sit back,” she said, her fingers pressing into my sternum and guiding me into the couch. “Look at me.”

I did.

She reached out her right hand and began to pull her fingertips across the left side of my face, back and forth, over my brokenness. Her fingertips traced my sunken left cheek where my cheek bone never grew and my bumpy, angular, reconstructed ear. She followed the red line of a giant scar that goes from the edge of my mouth to my ear. Her fingers touched every spot of imperfection on my face.

It took everything within me not to cry out in rage. I felt so vulnerable I thought I was going to faint. My cynicism wanted to spit at her. But since I had never let someone into that vulnerable space, I was terrified. The cynicism was my defense. I hated all of it. I don’t want your pity, I wanted to scream at her. I know what I look like. I know how broken I am. Stop patronizing me. I don’t need it and I don’t need you! I was so angry at everything and everyone.

But she didn’t stop. She kept touching my wounded face. After tracing the outlines of the checkered ridges, misplaced bones, and red scars, she tilted her head forward and began to kiss me. First, she kissed the top of my broken ear. Then the ridges of my ear. Then my underdeveloped jaw. She kissed me slowly and with intention. Her lips would touch as much flesh as possible, holding the pose for as long as it took for me to realize what she was communicating.

She wanted me to know and feel that she was kissing my wounded face. And she wanted me to know that she was choosing to kiss it. No one was forcing her. She wanted to kiss my wounded face because she loved me. Not the me I thought I was or the me I should be, but the real me, the one I thought I had been hiding from her. The deformed, broken, weak, deceptive, humiliated, wounded me. She wanted to kiss that me.

She wasn’t repulsed by my wounds. She wasn’t overlooking them. She saw them for what they were, and she knew that there would be no me without them and the stories they told of my life. So she loved them. Because they made the real me. And she loved the real me.

As she tenderly kissed every inch of wounded flesh on my face—every mark that carried the tragic baggage of all the rejections I had ever experienced, all the stares I had ever garnered, all the teasing I had ever been subject to, all my self-loathing—the shock and rage in my body began to give way. It melted within me. What replaced that rage was an emotion without a name. The closest thing I can call it is grief. Deep grief. Yet it transcended even that. I think it was a death. Something was dying in that moment.

I began to wail. I cried harder than I’ve ever cried in my life. I had always subconsciously believed that if I were ever to be truly seen for what I was, that if I couldn’t distract someone by making them look at the good parts of me, then they would reject me. Because that’s what wounded people receive—rejection. But now, for the first time ever, I knew I was truly being seen for what I was and that I was freely chosen as I was. Of course, I had been chosen and loved throughout my life by my parents and brothers. But the narrative I believed was that if my family had been honest, they would not have chosen me, not loved me, not kissed me. In my mind, they were overlooking my wounds because they were compelled to do so.

This is why the moment with Anna was so powerful. Anna was not family, and I knew she saw the real me. She called it out. I couldn’t hide. She wasn’t bound to me by blood. If she wanted to love me, it was her free choice. She kissed my wounded face over and over, and sorrow and pain emptied from my soul. She spoke no words. She didn’t stop. In that space of utter brokenness, I was deemed worthy of her love. And I encountered God like never before.

WOUNDS THAT HEAL OTHER WOUNDS

Lord, would you heal my son and make him whole?

But can you not see it? I already have.

Heal my son, God.

Look closer. It’s done.

How can God suggest I am whole when clearly, I am not? How can God say I am healed when others’ sidelong glances tell me they see someone still in need of healing? How can we be whole unless wholeness for God and wholeness for the rest of us are two different things?

To be clear, this is not a book about my experience having a broken face. It’s about how God met me in my soul’s wounds found within the stories of my face. It’s about how God longs to meet you inside your soul’s wounds too. All our souls bear wounds. Some come from brokenness we’re born with or born into, which we have to navigate in a fallen world. Some wounds come from pain inflicted on us through others’ sinful or ignorant actions. Some wounds we give ourselves, and we don’t even know why. And some wounds come from pain we inflict on others, which ends up hurting us in the process too. If we’re honest, we can recognize ourselves in all these scenarios. But no matter how our souls come by their wounds, the common denominator is that they all hurt—terribly. For those whose wounds are as painful as mine were, I don’t know if we really care about what happened, whose fault it is, or why—at least not at first. We just want to know if there’s a way to stop the pain. We want to be healed. We want to be whole.

As I began to explore the Bible for a way forward, I noticed something peculiar: many, if not most, of the biblical characters were very wounded people, spiritually and physically. Moses had a stutter and killed an Egyptian. Jacob was deceptive and ended up with a limp. David was the youngest of his brothers and driven by his feckless emotions. Paul had a mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” which has led to all sorts of hypotheses on whether this was physical, psychological, or spiritual pain—or maybe all three! Regardless, it had a humbling effect on Paul’s ministry, his preaching ability, and the shape of the good news of God in the churches he started.

The Bible is such a rich story because God works with our wounded human nature. But it wasn’t just that the characters had wounded personalities and pasts; rather, God used those wounded personalities and pasts specifically to fulfill his purposes. It wasn’t that God used people despite their wounds; rather, he used their wounds especially to work out his plans. The wounds weren’t baggage; no, they were the very instrument God used to save his world.

That astonished me. I was taught our woundedness was a result of sin—our being separated from God’s presence—which is true. I was also taught that God saves us in spite of this. However, when I looked closer, I saw no “despite-ness” at all in God’s dealings. He isn’t avoiding our sinful wounds. Rather, he is charging headlong into the most painful elements of our groaning creation. Wherever our most wounded people, behaviors, decisions, and temperaments are found, there is where God is clearly at work—harnessing, healing, delivering, empowering, saving—if we are only willing to look. When I realized this, I saw it everywhere. This simple truth—God saves us not despite our woundedness but by embodying it—is the message of the Bible.

Most importantly, we read it in Isaiah’s memorable passage about the suffering servant, who writes of the Savior: “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). God didn’t save us despite our wounds. He saved us through his own. The question then becomes, How do wounds heal other wounds? The answer to that question may help me understand God’s response to my dad so many years ago and how God is doing healing work in all our lives.

LOOKING INTO A MIRROR

Alice Miller, a psychotherapist and expert in childhood trauma, writes about the crucial first weeks of a child’s life and the need for the child to bond with his mother. “In the first weeks and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.7.2024
• Verlagsort: Lisle
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Moraltheologie / Sozialethik
• Schlagworte: Broken • church leader • debilitation • Despair • fallen world • freedom • growth • hopeless • Impairment • Inspirational • instpirational • Jesus • knowing god • Limitation • MIRRORING • Pain • Pastor • Restriction • vulnerability
• ISBN-10: 1-5140-0909-9 / 1514009099
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5140-0909-3 / 9781514009093