The Year of the Bruised Reeds

Not too long ago, a friend reminded me of Matthew 12:20, “… a bruised reed he will not break…”.

I, like many of you, would describe 2020 as a year of being badly bruised. With every painful punch of circumstance, whether it’s COVID-19 related or something personal, it’s getting harder to stand up and gain our composure. We’re trying to pick ourselves back up, but our bodies and our spirit are just feeling too exhausted to get up again. We’re feeling terribly discouraged.

Most likely, for you, like me, it has been a year of tremendous loss. We’ve lost family members, jobs, homes, opportunities to celebrate, periods of mourning…we’ve lost the feeling of normalcy and the sense of looking forward to things, even something as pleasurable as eating has become dull. As we’re realizing how close we are “to the end of ourselves,” I’d begrudgingly say, it’s a good place to be.

Becoming aware of our limitations and insignificance is not a terrible thing, only if it is in light of realizing how big our God is. Just like looking up at a dark sky and faintly seeing the glimpse of a star, far away, small but shining, I hope you see that however small you might feel, our God who loves us is most powerful.

Friends, true that we are badly bruised, but we’re not broken.

My prayer for you and me during this time is that God would allow us to catch a small glimpse of hope in all that we’re experiencing. And with that glimmer of hope, I hope that we’ll come to agree with the Psalmist that, “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”