Chains That Hold

When Rick met Lisa for the first time, the evidence of her abuse was a black, half-inch line of chain wrapped around her and pulling not a ball, but what looked like a corpse.

Nasty. Naturally, she wouldn’t have believed him even if he told her what was there.

Rick’s gift was specific — the burdens folk carried around, the dim twists and turns of their character, and the past in all its infamy were visually readable to his spirit. A gift it was. A curse as well.

He didn’t exactly look the part — cowboy boots and a bushy beard didn't exactly convince sufferers that he was a pastor and gifted as a healer of terminal brokenness. His gentle, and then burning, gaze did what his appearance failed to do. It spoke to hurt hearts. Those eyes knew.

What he did was reach out. His gift was seeing, and if the afflicted agreed to the cost, healing through Christ-- the one who did the actual healing.

And that healing did cost. Not finances, something far more costly.

What others did not perceive was that everyone carries burdens. We all unknowingly agree with the fact by holding memories. Chained to us by time and circumstance — unfaithful friends or spouses, past crimes we thought we had gotten away with, present dissatisfaction in life, rebellion — the list of weights borne is as endless as the eons of time, and one and all are capable of plunging the soul into the depths of the sea.

And who knows how to swim in those treacherous waters? No one...

Lisa’s mistake was nurturing past hurts, picking at the sore of abuse at the hands of unscrupulous men until it ruptured into a mistrust of all men. A stinking burden of pain.

Evidently, the ‘thing’ she was hauling behind had begun to rot. She had stuck flowers to it, a first in Rick’s experience, calling the chains with its horrid burden by other, lesser terms – maltreatment, victim, wounded. The smell of ‘Handle with care’ wafted from Lisa’s life.

It was no wonder that she was alone and avoided by others, with the potent stench pervading her psyche and attitude, despite her putting emotional ‘air freshener’ on it. That was Rick’s theory anyway...

Would she agree to the cure? So many preferred the pain they knew to the promised new life received when giving it all up. Such a lack of faith had decimated dozens of past victims he had hoped to release, but who were unwilling.

Forgiveness, and the healing it brings, never comes cheap.

Would she see the chains, the burden she hauled around?  Would she believe she could be free by His gift of grace?

"Hi, Lisa..." he began, "my name is Rick. Can I share a story with you?"

Image by ChatPGT, story from 2020