What images do these words conjure for you?

Abandoned

         Deserted

                      Discarded

                              Forsaken

                                      Alone

Whatever impressions emerge or pictures are drawn in your mind as you consider these words, it is likely that you have also experienced the feelings, the emotions, yes, the hurt and pain of abandonment or rejection.

Perhaps it was a parent – a mother or a father who abandoned you. Maybe it was a spouse or a child or a brother or a sister who rejected you. Those you believed were your friends, fellow “believers” in Jesus coldly and inexplicably forsook you and you found yourself suddenly and silently alone in your aloneness, shivering in the icy chill of your isolation, waiting in stunned silence for some sense, some understanding of what had happened, some reconciliation between what you thought you knew and believed and what you so painfully experienced.

Rejection and abandonment can come in a thousand costumes and speak with myriad voices. The effect, the result produced is always the same:

Rejection brings injury to the soul and anguish to the mind. Abandonment makes the heart grow weak, but more; desertion destroys self-worth. We learn early in life to discard what we do not need; what we do not want; what is not essential or profitable or useful or even acceptable.

Garbage is disposed of; trash is discarded. We keep only that to which we attach value.

An abandoned soul feels valueless, worthless, insignificant, useless.

A forsaken heart is more than empty and crushed and bruised and injured; it is a playground for devils, a gymnasium for demons.

From the soil of rejection flourish the sour fruits of bitterness, resentment and, dark, brewing rage. Implacable, stone-hearted and pitiless wrath proceed from hearts that have known the frigid winds of torment spawned by the uncaring, the unfeeling and the unaware.

From such renunciation Americans have become familiar with the name “Columbine” and “Red Lake High” in northern Minnesota and other, more recent scenes of torment and terror.

Most rejected and broken hearted people never pick up a gun or seek to lash out at others. There is no need and no desire. The slow, grinding suicide begun by the deadly injection of aloneness and friendlessness is as deadly as any bullet that ever roared in tortured anguish.

We cannot control if and when or by whom we will feel the lethal claws of abandonment.

What we can do, what we wield control over is our response to rejection. Options exist for the heart that was crushed. Brokenness may come, but annihilation is not inevitable. No soul that was crushed was ever beyond repair.

And there is Someone who knows…..feels….. empathizes…..understands….. cares, who is “touched by” our pains and who also possesses the power to heal even the most trampled upon and crushed heart. It was foretold of Him;

“I have put My Spirit upon Him; He will bring forth justice…He will not cry out, nor raise His voice, Nor cause His voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed He will not break, and smoking flax He will not quench.”

Who is this shining Knight; this Rescuer of offended hearts? Who is this Champion of the soul Who comes to right those who were wronged and to heal those who’s destruction seemed certain?

He came forth of misinterpreted illegitimacy and was raised in humble anonymity; He came forth from obscurity and moved about in lonely exile. He left His home country and renounced his nobility, He was self-effacing and pointedly unassuming. He sought nothing for Himself and was content by Himself.

He was “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

It is He Who “will bring forth justice for truth,” and God will hold His hand; “He will keep You and give You as a covenant to the people, as a light to the Gentiles to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the prison, those who sit in darkness from the prison house.”

And to the One Who promised, “I will hold Your hand” hear the anguished cry from the central cross on that Crucifixion Day of all Days when Innocence was fixed to the Tree of Final Death: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

“Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him….” because He saw your face and knew your brokenness and He anticipated through forsaking Him, your wholeness.

This Man above men, “made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the    likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross” So that He might see you, find you, know you, touch you, heal you, a bruised reed, tender, delicate, nearly too far gone to be repaired, but repairable in the Hands of a Master Physician.

And when we – you and I – accept and receive healing and restoration and the comfort of friendship with Him, we then carry within ourselves the knowledge, the ability and the sympathy to carry Him to another abandoned, rejected, forgotten heart, “that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

So, we reach to the “least of these.” We find ourselves among “orphans and widows.” We observe pure religion and undefiled before God because we become what He has always been; a Father to the fatherless; a Lover of the unlovely; a Friend to the friendless. A visitor of prisoners and a provider of a cloak, a meal, a home…a heart that knows, that feels, that sees, that understands.

Our Abandonment was essential for anothers Recovery

We were deserted so that we might learn to Salvage

                     Discarded so we could Recapture

                              Forsaken that we might Comprehend

                                         Alone that we might find the true Companion

What images are conjured in your heart? What scenes play before your mindscreen? Someone has been abandoned, deserted, discarded, forsaken. And who will notice? Who will go? Who will touch them in their brokenness and in their loneliness and who will bring them to the Forsaken One who alone has the antidote for this poison of the soul?