The Crucified

“The Crucified is the One most traumatized, most grieved. HE bore the holocausts and genocides. HE has carried the massacres, the starving, the crushing poverty, and debilitating illnesses. HE has carried every child who has been trafficked, tortured, abused and thrown away. HE was wounded for the sins of those who have perpetrated such horrors. And HE has borne our selfishness, our complacency, our love of success, our self-righteousness, and our pride. HE has also borne our grief and our pain over the sights and sounds of evil that we ourselves have endured. HE has been into the darkness. HE has known the loss of all things. HE has been abandoned by His Father. HE has been to hell. There is no part of any tragedy that HE has not known and carried. You will never enter an urban war zone, you will never face a perpetrator you will never hear a victim’s story, you will never sit by a deathbed, and you will never look in a child’s frightened face that you are not encountering something your Lord has carried. HE has done this so that none of us need face tragedy alone, for HE has been there before us and will go with us and will work through us. For what HE has done for us in Gethsemane, and at Calvary, HE asks us to do as well.”  Diane Langberg