This Bleeding World

I've had another interesting experience today. I went to my 11:30 Bio lecture and as it turned out only four other students showed up. It being an absolutely gorgeous sunny warm autumn day my professor suggested we take our small study session outside. And since it was just women, of course we got to talking about life, men, marriage, weight, death, spirituality, pyschics, child birth. It was really quite amazing how open we all were with eachother, especially my professsor, who told us weepily about the death of her brother and her failing 23 year marriage.

This led to another one of the girls telling us about how she was recently left waiting at the altar for her fiance. She finished with how she wished she had seen a pyshic before her wedding, because then she would've known and could've been prepared. And it reminded me of a mother recently talking of her grown son, "I'm worried if he goes into ministry because he might get hurt." Ah. Here we are; hurt.
How we wish we could protect and prevent it, but we can't. And while, it is AWFUL, it is part of life. We have all experienced it, we have all had to deal with hurt. Life is full of it. Yes, hurt it sucks and its universal. I've found though it is through pain that we grow. I've learned much more from pain and hard things, than from pleasant. I feel more compassion because of the hurt. I say this only of course, because I can give my hurt to Jesus, he reaches out and touches and feels it with me and takes it. Because really though I've learned through my pain, the only reason I'm not crippled by it is because I don't have to bear it alone. And of course I still have loads I'm sure I need to work on.
And it made me sad and glad. Glad that I have a Savior who isn't afraid of my messy ugly hurt. Glad that I can look back now on past hurt and have grown and pushed through it. And yet sad because the world is full of so much hurt. People who don't deal with it, who want to hide from life or love, people walking around practically crippled with pain from hurt. And with this in my mind I must do as Donald Miller says we need, " to hold our hands against the wounds of this broken world, to stop the bleeding."