Pick Up Your Mat and Walk

The rain falls gently outside the windowpane of my apartment in Los Angeles. Normally the weather here is sunny, but today the rain patters, and I breathe.

This has been a season of loss. Of anger. Of waiting. A season where what I thought I knew was turned on its head. A season where my understanding of forgiveness and grace was challenged in a way it never had been before. A season of choosing to trust God when my flesh would rather just walk away.

The rain drips, and so drips my soul. The pains of this season welling up, then falling down my cheeks. And I wish this could just be the end. 

It’s been a year since my world turned. Since the wounding that unhinged my soul. It’s been a year, and shouldn’t I be moving on? Shouldn’t I, with the walk with the Lord that has spanned decades, be able to trust God enough to move on in healing? To fully lose the reminders of pain and weight that I can’t seem to shake?

And as I sit, God speaks to me. Not in the loud voice for which I so often long, but in the quiet prompting I so often need:

“Pick up your mat, and walk.”

And it occurs to me in an instant from a story as old as Christ in flesh: He didn’t get to leave his mat.

I go to scripture, read it whole in John chapter 5. Read it for clues and deeper meaning, and there it is in black and red. 

Jesus, in compassion, when He encounters a man who had been sick for 38 years, asks him if he wants to be well.

We have to want it.

Oh, how many times have I loved my misery? Wished for happiness, for ease of heart, sure. But sat in my mess and not even reached up to my Savior, whose hands have already reached to me.

Do I want it?

Yes, says the man, without knowing to whom he is speaking.

“Pick up your mat, and walk.”

And he does.

He walks away healed that day, but he doesn’t get to leave his mat.

Jesus heals his body, but the reminder of his pain he still has to carry with him.

Perhaps that is where I am. Where you are. Acknowledging Jesus has already provided a way for our eternal healing, for us to have eternal peace, and hope. But as long as this broken world spins, there will be reminders in our own stories of the brokenness we’ve faced. We don’t forget that life is broken, we only remember that Christ has come. 

Our broken stories, our pains, our dirty mats we still have to carry forward, remind us with every step of the good Savior that has provided a way out of this and into a perfect eternity.

For now, though, it’s a reminder of where we have been, and where we are going.

We are made for an eternity we cannot fathom, with a God we have yet to know in full. Perhaps we will not lose the full weight of this broken world until the day we enter into heaven. Perhaps until then, our reminders of broken are the same things that remind us why it is we need a Savior in the first place. 

And I smile. Perhaps I am more healed than I thought. Perhaps healing just looks like acknowledging my need for Christ, and daily obeying Him in the command to move forward. To walk forward with the broken and trust healing will take place, has taken place, will continue to take place, in the timing of the One who knows no time.

This mat, its hard and dirty and I wish I could set it down.

And one day, I’ll get to.