Separation

I used to imagine every single awful thing I have ever done being mulled over by Jesus while he was being whipped and mocked.  I used to think that as He hung on the cross lists of sins would just ripple across his broken and bruised body.

I don't see that this year. 

This year I have, for the first time in my life, really slowed myself down to realize what was going on a few thousand years ago during these last several days.  I have tried to imagine being with him in the garden where he was so consumed with sorrow that he sweat drops of blood.  It's always been explained that those drops were because of my sin.  And I get that...but I think it was so much more.  He was about to be separated for the first time...from His Father.

Sin is separation from our Holy God.  Sin isn't "sin" because it's a list of bad things---a hierarchy of who is the holiest.  It is absence of Him.  And He is Love.  I am just now understanding a tiny fragment of this.  How much more did Jesus understand it all. 

He wasn't hanging there being shocked by all of humanity's specific sins over and over and over.  He was hanging there broken for us...and because of us...he was separated from Him.  Have you ever lost someone you love?  Death, divorce, abandonment?  It hurts.  It breaks.  Tears cried in those dark hours are so thick, so bitter that they cry out for themselves.

As I have begun to understand that all sin is merely (because we so often try to over-complicate this) yet profoundly (focusing on the lists and hierarchy causes us to keep our eyes on US as opposed to HIM) separation from our Holy Father, I understand even more what happened on that cross.  I cannot imagine being separated from my children.  For my precious son who truly knows very little of his own wrong to be ripped away and suffer because of other people's sin (our CONSTANT turning away from Him and to ourselves...chosen separation).  For him to think for one moment that I had abandoned him.  For him to call out my name and feel as if I had forsaken him.  I have no words fit for such sacrifice.

I only have a life, a life lived very imperfectly but made perfect by His blood.  I don't want to be separated, not even for a second, from our Lord and Savior.  May my life become a constant out-pouring of Him...more of Him...less of me.