The Sting of Death

“O, Death, where is your sting?
Our resurrected king
Has rendered you defeated”
 
Those words have always been one that shot straight to my heart, an arrow of promised healing.
 
Death, where is your sting?  
 
These words bring to mind that last breath on this side of eternity and the freedom of knowing that Jesus waits for me on the other side.
 
But what about the death that is among the living? The living dead, so to speak.
 
Those things that are a death all unto itself.  A smaller death.  A silent death.  A death that can slowly drain and render you empty of life.
 
 
Hurt
Rejection
Pain
Betrayal
Complete and utter brokenness
 
Death comes in many forms.  Sometimes one little bit at a time. Other times all at once.
 
 
Death of joy
Death of self
Death of a friendship
Death of hope
 
I tend to focus on that last breath kind of death when I sing this song.  But I am learning that He gave his last breath for more than the promise of heaven.  He gave His last breath to bring us to life in the land of the living.
 
BUT He has rendered those other, smaller, deaths defeated as well.
 
He does bring beauty, o such beauty, out of that heap of ashes that you may have given up on.  Those dreams, those hopes that you have long burned, the ones you have sacrificed at the altar of another.  He resurrects those as well.
 
That rejection that still stings, He brings his healing balm to comfort you.  In ways that you could never expect.  Through that friendship that surprises or that restoration that you thought would never come.
 
Do you remember that time that you could hardly walk under the heaviness of the brokenness that you carried?  He redeems that too.  
 
I don’t know how or the ways in which His redemption will come.  I just know He (it) does.  
 
The reason I know is because I have been those things.  I have felt that rejection and betrayal and pain.  I have felt that complete and utter brokenness.  The one that had me feeling shattered, thinking that I could never be put back together again.
 
And I waited, not even patiently, but I waited.  It was not a pretty waiting.. It was a fist balled in the air, yelling, sobbing, messy kind of waiting.  A waiting that left me on the bathroom floor, begging Him to just make this pain go away.
 
But He did not leave me there.  Oh no, He couldn’t leave me there.  Because the love that He holds for me requires Him to walk into that ash heap and trade it for beauty.  To exchange that cloak of despair for a covering of celebration.  
 
That same Love is the one who made the sting of death inept.  There is no power any more in any of those deaths, the last death or the smaller ones that come along.
 
There is a fierceness that happens in the soul when you have seen God exchange your hopelessness, your pain, your rejection and in turn give you such joy and peace and hope.
 
For you who are feeling those smaller deaths, know that He will turn your valley of weeping into a spring that refreshes.  
 
It is not just that final death that is without sting, it is also those other deaths, that ultimately have no sting.
 
He has rendered those defeated as well.

So go. Be fierce.