The Kindest Shock

What It Felt Like

Let's describe it so you know I'm not making it up. You were reading or hearing something — a sermon, a page, a verse finally read without the old filters — and it landed. Not in your mind first. In your chest. Like someone had opened a cabinet in your sternum and taken out an organ you didn't know you had and held it up to the light and said look. And you looked. And you saw. And you couldn't unsee.

You felt seen in a way that was physically uncomfortable. Your face got hot. Your stomach dropped. You put down the book or closed the tab or walked out of the sanctuary, and for days afterward you kept trying to get back to who you were before and couldn't quite find the room. You felt like someone had performed surgery on you without anesthetic. You felt angry, though you could not point to the person you were angry at. You felt exposed, though the only one who had seen anything was God and He had been seeing it your whole life.

You called this violent. You were right. But you did not yet know what had just been violently removed.

What Was Removed

A tumor. Not a small one. A tumor that had been growing in you since childhood, the way tumors grow in everyone since childhood, feeding quietly on what should have been your life. The tumor was called self-trust, and its cells were distributed throughout the tissue of your soul — in your theology, in your testimony, in your self-image, in your idea of how you were loved by God. You could not have found it with a scalpel because it was not in one place. It was everywhere. To remove it required a specific kind of violence: the violence of truth.

The surgeon was not cruel. He was skilled. He is the one who designed your tissue in the first place and knew exactly where to cut. What He used for an incision was a doctrine — the sovereign election of God, or the giftedness of faith, or the depth of your own depravity. What He used for the anesthetic was nothing. You had to be awake. He needed you to see the tumor come out so that you would not believe the next version of yourself was a work you had done.

The reason it felt cruel is that you had been living with the tumor for so long that it had become you. You were attached to it. It had, in some sense, kept you warm at night. When it came out you felt a terrible cold where it had been, and you mistook the cold for loss. It was not loss. It was the first time the healthy tissue had ever been exposed to air. The cold was healing, not harm.

The Kindness That Looked Like a Blade

"Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?"

ROMANS 2:4

Paul uses a specific word for kindness there. It is chrēstotēs, and in the Greek it was used for wine that had aged long enough to become smooth, for bread that had been kneaded and baked properly, for tools that had been broken in until they fit the hand. It means gentleness that comes from maturity. God's kindness is not a soft-edged niceness. It is a matured love that knows exactly what the soul needs and is willing to administer it even when administration looks, to the patient, like assault.

This is the kindness that stopped Paul on the Damascus road by blinding him. This is the kindness that threw Jonah off a boat. This is the kindness that sent a whale to a drowning prophet and then vomited him onto a beach. This is the kindness that let Peter deny three times, let the rooster crow, let the memory of Christ's look burn in him, and then showed up on another beach and asked Simon, son of John, do you love me? three times until every denial had been answered by a new call. In each case, kindness did what gentle niceness could never have done. Kindness went where the wound was.

You have just experienced that kindness. The fact that it did not feel like what you used to call kindness is not evidence that it was cruel. It is evidence that what you used to call kindness was often just indulgence, and that indulgence would have left the tumor in place forever.

The Moment You Will Understand

The understanding will come. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not this month. But there will be a morning — probably ordinary, probably unremarkable, probably while you are doing something forgettable like pouring coffee or looking at a sidewalk — when you will realize that you are not afraid anymore. That the old knot that used to live in your chest has loosened. That the performance has stopped. That you have started to rest in a way you didn't know was available to you. And on that morning you will look back at the violence of this week, this night, this moment, and you will say the words every soul eventually says at the end of a good surgery: He did what I could not have asked for but needed.

You will then do something you are not doing right now. You will thank Him for the violence. Because you will see that the violence was love refusing to let you stay where the tumor would have killed you. The scar will be the shape of grace. The scar will be holy. You will run your hand over it in moments of doubt and be reassured by the very thing that hurt you most, because the scar is proof that you were not too far gone to be reached. Someone reached. Someone cut. Someone loved you enough to hurt you to save you. He is not going to stop.

Tonight, Just This

Do not try to feel grateful tonight. You do not have to. Gratitude is the fruit that grows on the tree of healing, and the tree has just been transplanted. The roots will take a while to settle. You do not need to produce the fruit tonight. You need to let the tree be in the new soil.

Tonight, do one thing. Put down the book. Put down the phone. Stand somewhere that is a little bit quiet. And say, out loud if you can, the sentence that the patient says when the surgery is over: I don't understand what you just did. But I trust that you did it because you love me. I'm going to rest now. That is all. You do not have to name all the doctrines correctly. You do not have to rewrite your testimony on the spot. You have to rest. The God who just operated on you will do the rest. That is, after all, His job. And He has been doing it since before you were born. He is not bad at it. He is the best at it. The shock was kindness. The scar is love. The rest is coming. Let it come.

"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds."

PSALM 147:3

He did not break your heart as a cruelty. He broke it because it needed to be broken to be healed. The binding has already started. By morning, the bandage will be tighter than you could ever have bound it yourself.