The Cornerstone
Throughout the bible, we hear about a role reversal. I honestly had never thought much into it. However, over and over throughout both the old and new testament things like “the least of these will inherit the kingdom of God” are mentioned. As a girl raised in the church I had heard these verses for many years. I mistakenly took them to mean that the sad, tired, and beaten down will be loved the most. With that outlook, I spent many years submitting myself to martyrdom and abuse. I taught people it was acceptable to treat me a certain way and did so with pride because I believed I was being “the bigger person” and “turning the other cheek.” I stood tall with my chin held high and took the punches both literally and figuratively, in the name of love, forgiveness, and grace. This was, after all, Christ-like wasn’t it? The ultimate sacrifice. The greatest selflessness.
In 2019 I started a battle with the Lord. He slowly began revealing truths to me and dismantling the life and reality I knew so well. My eyes were slowly, and gently being opened. My mentor likes to say “The Holy Spirit is a gentleman.” As it turns out, all my yelling at Him to help me, He was waiting for me to allow Him all along. God won’t dismantle your life for you. He won’t come through and say, here that’s close enough to rock bottom, let’s get this back on track. He waits for us to implode and then, as we dismantle it ourselves, He steps up to help us reframe and see clearly. The key here is that He only does so when we release those places. It’s our free choice, our right to our own lives however we see fit to live them. They are ours to own, mold, create, and live with.
By 2021 I had slowly unraveled everything I had known about life, faith, love, and purpose. I was facing a very empty and confused blank slate. A relearning of sorts. To start my year I spent time “listening” waiting to get a “word” from the Holy Spirit. This was a downright foreign idea to me. To be honest, after some substantial spiritual abuse I really avoided anything Holy Spirit oriented. It freaked me out. But again, I had been undergoing an unraveling and was trying to stay open-minded. As it turns out, He spoke. A few verses “popped” into my awareness, if you will. So I wrote them down and spent the better part of the year ruminating on them. Just when I thought I had a solid understanding of how they pertained to my life, a new layer would peel off and I would see a deeper level into the way they intertwined.
It wasn’t until late in the year of 2021 that He slowly revealed to me what blew my mind. I am sure for many people this seems like common sense. But I can confidently tell you from the perspective of someone who had long seen life in a very hopeless, and tainted sense, this was absolutely a new vantage point.
Alright so here it is, what if it’s those of us who hit bottom who are really the luckiest? What if He desired for us to have life easy, full of joy, and peacefully content? However, in our broken, screwed-up world we are impacted by a constant flow of imperfection and pain, during which we have total free choice over our coping skills and actions. Sometimes our best survival mechanisms become our greatest downfalls. We become those second-rate, broken people we see “praised” throughout the bible. Here’s the catch, it isn’t the fact that we are the “least of these” that makes us powerful or makes us special. The pain isn’t what makes Him love us or earns us favor. Instead, it’s the power that comes from being a conqueror… a survivor…. A warrior. From the salvation of Him rebuilding us into who we were created to be in the first place. That is what makes us special. It’s the testimony we get to share. It’s the fact that we survived when we tried to kill ourselves. Our free choice and attempt to create beauty let to actions, stories, and empathy that tell a story to inspire. We can speak truth from a whole different level because we’ve seen the darkness in ways others can only imagine.
We are powerful beyond others. Think about it like this, the greatest warriors are those who have seen the battle many times. There are plenty of soldiers who have incredible potential and train fervently. However, as prepared and inspiring as they are, it will never be quite the same as the soldier who faced battle after battle on the field. They are both valuable soldiers but in different ways. We are the soldiers who have seen battle. We come back and we train the others. We tell them things and help them train to be more prepared in battle than we were. Most of them may never have to see the battles we did, but they will be prepared because we did. That is our purpose. That is the glorious rebuilding of our triumph and our priceless purpose!
In Proverbs, it says “the rejected stone has become the cornerstone” and we are that stone, the cornerstone. Jeremiah 31 says the woman will encircle the man. I sat on that one forever trying to understand what He was getting at with that. Then finally I saw. The woman was the weak, insubordinate, uneducated second-class citizen in that culture. The woman was the over-looked, and yet, she would become the protector of the man. It was the role reversal that we see all throughout scripture. She would be the rejected stone turned into a cornerstone. She would become the superhero. Not because of her pain, but instead because of the power she would obtain when God worked the role reversal. Again we see this with the woman at the well, the first person Jesus tells that he is the Son of God. She was a woman and on top of that, not a woman of character. He chooses us not because we had suffered, but instead because our triumph is so exceptionally remarkable
My pastor was using the analogy of travel and mentioned having a car but choosing to walk. Some of us never realize we have a car and decide to travel by foot the whole way from Portland, Oregon to the Mexico border. Then we find out we could have just taken our car, or better yet, a quick flight! Instead, we took the longest route that was never necessary. However, after it’s all said and done, it’s our biography that tells all those people all the reasons why they would want to take the plane! It’s our story that lets them celebrate the fact that they don’t have to take 150+ days to travel the same distance they could do in a few hours. The end story, however unfortunate the battle was, becomes the cornerstone of hope. It is the inspiration of survival and the human experience. We aren’t special because of our struggle. We become special for our success. A supernatural success that is beyond our human capabilities. Our success is because of His love and willingness to patch together a history of broken survival skills, detrimental generational habits, and hopeless decision-making. His ability to defy odds is perfected in our pain and inspirational in our survival. We are given an opportunity to be a superhero in spite of ourselves. It isn’t our pain that makes us great, it’s the freedom we experience after defying the odds.
