By definition, human life is fragile.

It is uneven and unpredictable.

There are times when even the strongest, cleverest and most self-assured of us has to acknowledge —if we are truthful —that we have little or no control over the circumstances in which we find ourselves!

We can experience both truly good times and exceedingly bad times, both genuine joy and horrendous woe.

We can be integrated and balanced one moment and scattered into tiny pieces the next.

Regardless of where you might be right now on the spectrum of joy and woe, the fact is that you will at some time come face to face with your own human fragility.

Gender, nationality, race and age make no difference; whether you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, God-fearing or atheist, agnostic, Muslim, New Age, Mormon, Jew, Hindu, Humanist or Christian, famous or unknown, space scientist or dressmaker, university professor or home-helper, monarch, president, prime minister or bar waitress.

And it does not matter in which country you were born or the particular time in history that you entered this world.

The question, therefore, is not whether you will face times of fragility in your life but rather what are the dependable resources and options available to you when you do.

Examples of Human Fragility

By fragility I mean your human ‘brokenness’.

I mean the times in your life when you experience

• failure

• the potential downsides of your particular personality

• psychological, mental, emotional, spiritual or physical illness

• any kind of abuse

• the unraveling of deeply cherished personal relationships

• periods of despair or self-condemnation

• any negative emotions

• any kind of personal grief, trauma or loss

At these times of trial, when the experience of your human fragility is most raw, I want you always to have this fact very clear in your mind and heart: which is, that the Lord is searching passionately for you.

You see, in times of fragility, your negative emotions can get in the way and make it seem as though God is absent.

To make matters worse, because you fear losing control over your life, your human instincts can sorely tempt you to seize back control over your situation at your human level.

Often, you do this unconsciously. 

Here’s the problem: in trying to regain control at the human level, you can fall into the trap of bypassing God’s supernatural help —even though this is neither your intention nor desire.

And again without consciously intending to, you might end up controlling God too!

Like the hedgehog under attack, tightly coiled up in your fragility with your quills in permanent ‘defense-mode’, you can end up blocking the most reliable and 24/7 available Source of help!

You can end up isolating yourself from the help and support you so clearly need. 

You can get in the way of God doing the one job only He can do, and does best: namely, to be GOD for you: i. e. to bring you into an experience of His love and joy and peace, each one of which has the power necessary to heal you and bring you right through your painful experience of fragility to lasting victory. 

This can be the greatest barrier to receiving God’s help and healing during your time of fragility.

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I want you to understand that your human fragility is not a ‘fault’.

It’s simply a liability that comes with your human make-up.

But the truth is that you and I can’t deal with this liability at our human level alone. It definitely requires God’s supernatural help and wisdom.

 

Developing a Skin that’s Tough as Nails is Not the Answer!

One way of dealing with this liability would be to develop a skin that’s as tough as a carpenter’s old nails.

While this might seem to afford you some degree of protection from pain and evil it would also do something else to you —something profoundly harmful: it would shut out not just the bad times but the good times as well. 

You see, in real life good times and bad times are inextricably connected.

You need to go through the bad times of life in order to fully experience the good ones.

Similarly, you need to have fully experienced the good times in order to appreciate just how painful human life can be!

Developing a skin that’s as hard as nails is not, therefore, the answer to your human fragility.

It will force you to adopt a primarily ‘defensive’, life-denying attitude to God, to life, and to other people.

Your habitual defensiveness can lead to harshness.

And harshness that is left to its own devices can, in time, become deeply wounding to you and to others —and to God himself. You see, the Lord never wants to see you wounding yourself.

Over time, your old carpenter’s nails and hedgehog quills can take over your life.

They can control you.

Your negative/afflictive emotions can lead to violence in your words, and even perhaps your actions, whether suppressed or expressed.

You will not be free.

And when you’re not free, your opportunities for experiencing the high-quality life that the Lord TRULY wants for you (John 10:10) become seriously diminished.

A Much Gentler Way to Go!

There’s a far gentler pathway to healing your pain.

It’s a pathway in which God holds hands with you for the duration of your healing. 

Here’s the thing:

When you follow this pathway, you give the Lord permission to dissolve and heal the wounding, life-denying barriers you might have unconsciously put up to Him and others.

This is the help God has longed to give you.

And here’s the really good news: 

This pathway puts you in immediate touch with God’s HEALING LOVE, WISDOM, PEACE, and JOY. 

Here’s even more good news: 

You can access the Lord’s healing love, peace, wisdom, and joy not just once or twice or three times in your life but as often as you need or want to —several times a day, or even more. 

You’ll discover that you no longer need to use up all your emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual energies in adopting a defensive, life-denying posture towards God, yourself, and other people.

In fact, you’ll now be able to accept and welcome anything in your life as it comes, not deny it! 

In other words, you’ll be truly FREE!

 

God is Inviting You Right Now to Allow Him to Accompany You All the Way through Your Experiences of Fragility

I don’t know what particular experience of fragility you may be struggling with right now.

But I know for certain that God is inviting you RIGHT NOW to allow Him to enter right into its midst, so that He might find you and LOVE you right where you are, just as you are —warts, sins, failure, weaknesses and all! 

God ALWAYS wants to heal you from your hurt and wounds. 

God Understands your Experiences of Fragility Better than You Understand Them: That’s why He Became a Human Being Just Like You

You see, God became a human being just like you precisely so that He could understand and identify with your human fragility. 

He knew that we human beings would not be able to relate to Him unless He shared fully our humanity with all its temptations, pain and fragility!

He also understands (much better than you or I could ever do) why you might have resorted to carpenter’s nails and hedgehog quills to protect yourself from your pain. 

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