Broken No More
“I have suffered much; preserve my life, LORD, according to your word.”
Today’s Text: Psalm 119:105-120 (Living Life Daily Devotional)
Have I really suffered much? Lord knows I have. But the Lord also knows how much I haven’t.
I was born into a poor family from Young-do in Busan. But is being poor a unique experience for me? I was a kid and didn’t even realize I was poor. All I knew was that I had nightmares about that dark and stinky outhouse in the courtyard.
I never knew my mother or father as an infant or a toddler, or any of my immediate family. I knew only my grandmother. But suddenly at the age of three or four, I was stripped away from the only nurturing I knew and catapulted half way across the earth into an immigrant family with a father and a mother and three brothers—none of whom I recognized. It was as if I had been born out of a petri dish and plopped into a family as some kind of cruel social experiment.
But is feeling like an orphan misplaced into a cruel social experiment a unique experience for me? And besides, at least I was misplaced into the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. At least I had a family—sort of.
It turned out that my “mother” was not my mother, and two of my brothers were only half brother. Of course, I only discovered that after a huge knock-down, drag-out fight between my parents at the tender age of nine.
What a cruel, cruel world this is for an awkward immigrant kid with no clear sense of being human. Why did it have to be filled with so much hate, so much sorrow, so much anger, so much betrayal, so much yelling? But is that my experience alone?
The Lord knows how much I have suffered. But have I really? Well, yes. And the Lord knows.
And no matter how much I may have suffered, Christ has suffered that much more, so that I might suffer no more.
The LORD has promised it.
Father, Thank You for Your mercy. And thank You for being mindful of me. Thank You for Your love. Let no suffering get the better of me. For You have preserved my life. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
