Twenty-some years ago when I was a new Christian, a few passages really captured my imagination. These I would read over and over and commit them to heart as though my very life depended on them. One of these was the story of the lame beggar we read about in Acts 3. Here’s verses 1-10:
One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon. Now a man who was lame from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple courts. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, “Look at us!” So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them.
Then Peter said, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” Taking him by the right hand, he helped him up, and instantly the man’s feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk. Then he went with them into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God. When all the people saw him walking and praising God, they recognized him as the same man who used to sit begging at the temple gate called Beautiful, and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.
Of course, at the time I was in the King James Version so my memorization sounded more like this: “Silver and gold have I none, but such that I have, I give unto thee. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” There was something poetic in it. What struck me then was this image of a God who can do miracles through anyone. I was enamored with a God who will do more than we can even imagine (see Eph. 3:20-21).
What strikes me 20 years later is similar, and yet very different. Today, I think much more of the beggar. What was it like for him to be carried every day to a place just to beg for money? What was it like for him to be on the outside of God’s house, begging and pleading? He was an outsider for sure (see my poston that a few weeks ago).
Likely, his scale of discouragement was through the proverbial roof. The shame and humiliation, the continual wondering when his situation would change, when it wouldn’t be a day-to-day battle. He seemed to have everything working against him—physical, emotional, social, psychological. Possibly it is here we could hang a banner over his head which declares the bold truth of Proverbs 13:12: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick…”
Just the other day a woman wrote to me and said that all of her hope is gone, that she has been wounded so often that her cynicism won’t allow her to trust the church again. Words on a screen don’t convey the 99 percent of the language her body could tell me if we were face to face, and yet in between each word, I saw tears.
This morning in our worship service, our pastor spoke of tears, saying, “Tears expose both our loss and our longing. Tears are not meant to be a period, a full stop. They are meant to be a comma, looking to what comes next.”
I wonder if the lame beggar, after seeing nothing change and the people of God go in and out day after day with no critical change began to actually believe nothing would change. I wonder if his hope deferred had crushed his spirit.
I wonder that of so many of us who don’t see change. We have lost hope in the kindness of others, in the beauty of life, in the reason and impact of the resurrection.
In that lame beggar I see those wrestling with the church. We are looking and hoping someone will stop and do more than just bandage our wounds. We long for someone to move beyond a perfunctory “It’ll be okay” and walk with us deeply into our lameness and our broken hearts. We hope for that one person, that one small group, that one pastor to remember us and to reach out.
There’s no mistaking: hope deferred does make the heart sick.
I have a friend who was preaching the gospel in a restricted access country not too long ago. After the service, a woman who had been blind for years came forward and her friends and her were asking for prayer. As the minutes passed and the prayer continued, slowly the woman began to see. Her sight was fully restored.
Yeah, really. God is this business every moment of every day.
Proverbs 13:12 doesn’t end in sorrow, by the way. In actuality, there is a completely different ending: “…but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
When we least expect it is the moment when often God does the most. Don’t miss that, friends! It’s Christmas week. When Jesus was born as a baby in that manger, the people of God were living in 400 years of silence. Had their expectation of a savior of the world diminished? Had their hopes that someone could actually be the Coming One dimmed? Were their hearts sick from longing?
So too the lame beggar. But you know the end of the story… God did intercede. Two of God’s people did stop and gave him something far beyond what his diminished expectations could only imagine—true healing.
The lame beggar outside the temple became the healed one praising God and declaring his glory!
I wish I could utter that statement a hundred times over.
Those of us broken and hurting, those of us sitting on the outside wondering who will hear and care, are the ones who have the greatest opportunity to declare God’s glory and love.
Indeed, we hope for others to care for us as we’d like. We long to be part of a church that feels like family. We wish that our church leaders would behave. We desire that people would look beyond our gender, our sexual orientation, our economic level, our race, our personality quirk, and into the truth of who we are equally seated at the cross of our Savior.
But know this as Christmas hearkens you near to Jesus—your tears are not a period. Your tears are indeed the comma to the deeper place, where in faith, I am trusting with you that when you least expect it, God will meet you in a way more profound than you could have ever dreamed.
Merry Christmas, my broken and beautiful friends.
I love you all, Laurie