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Cracking up is seriously not funny.
The pandemic and the economic situation have put a lot of people under pressure, and the cracks have been getting close to the surface for lots of us.
So what are you going to do ... paper them over or re-do the fabric from within?
Self healing concrete
When I was doing some study a decade ago I came across self-healing concrete.
It does basically what it sounds like it does.
When a crack develops in the concrete, water seeps in and wakes up the bacteria.
Like a lot of us, those little bacteria wake up hungry so they eat their packed lunch, conveniently excrete a material called calcite, and the calcite heals up the crack in the concrete.
Now, if ONLY you could do something like that with people who've been battered and cracked up by life!
Well, hold on a minute ...
Healing the cracks in a life
You can't adequately fix structural cracks in concrete by covering them up or even sticking plasters onto the outside.
And you can't do that (says the Apostle Paul) with people either.
But God (says Paul) has got a solution for broken humans.
The Apostle Paul knew what it was to have a hard and stressful time, but he knew what to do about it too.
He writes about it to the early church that sprang up when Paul preached Corinth:
"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not driven to despair;
persecuted, but not forsaken;
struck down, but not destroyed;
always carrying in the body the death of Jesus
so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies."
2 Corinthians 4:8-10
"Therefore we do not despair,
but even if our physical body
is wearing away,
our inner person
is being renewed day by day."
2 Corinthians 4:16
It's not so much 'self healing' (and neither is the concrete, by the way ... the concrete needs it's little bacteria to help it out!)
Paul doesn't claim to be able to sort life out for himself ... it's God right inside his life, sorting out Paul's crack-ups from the inside out.
The Point
Nobody's life or challenges are exactly the same as someone else's, but Paul writes about the hard experience of his challenging life for the benefit of all of us as we live OUR lives.
The key, Paul says, is to live our lives walking with God Who puts His Holy Spirit into the deepest recesses of our personalities, to take up residence there and heal us deeply daily from within ... restoring our strength to live resiliently in His ways from day to day.
We need to live with running repairs happening each and every day from the inside of our all-too-human spirit to the out.
How does that happen?
It happens as we lean by faith throughout each day on God ... through every conscious moment of each day.
The Takeaway
You can't go on papering over your cracks ... they'll just show up when you don't want them to and let you down.
You need to get serious - like Paul - about walking with Jesus.
Not just on Sundays.
No time off for 'Sindays'.
Living in His presence every part of every day.
And then He deals with each crack and each crumbling from the time it begins ... making His people resilient from the inside out.
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