Being Known

​Yesterday, I wrote an article that seemed to resonate with some of you. At the heart of the article was the idea that "our wounds aren't meant for a grave, they are meant for new life."

I suggested new life comes through those burdens when we share them and not when we hide them. As evidence, I pointed to Jesus, who when seeing his disciples after he rose from the dead, pointed to his wounds and declared, "it is I myself."

Jesus could have left his wounds in a grave, but he chose to bring them with him to his resurrected life.

I had a friend ask several questions in response to my article. Questions I've spent years pondering before writing what I wrote yesterday. My friend asked:

Do your burdens need to be clearly seen by others or by yourself only? And, what would a person do if they could not reveal to others that burden?

My answers here are not advice; they are my story. My history. But I'll start by sharing another Jesus encounter. The encounter Jesus had with the woman at the well - one of my favorite bible stories ever.

The bible tells us that Jesus and his disciples stopped at a well to get some water. They stopped in a Samaritan community where culturally speaking, they had no business stopping.

But those were the places Jesus liked to stop. They were the conversations Jesus lived for.

While there, Jesus had an encounter with a woman. A woman who had been shunned and marginalized by her marginalized community. She was the outcast amongst the outcast.

Can life get much lower?

This woman and Jesus, they started having a conversation. And during that conversation, they had this exchange in John chapter 4:

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; For you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband."

And the woman said, "What you have said is true.”

I read that and I know Jesus was not setting the woman up to confess her sins, he was setting her up to release her burdens. He wasn't setting her up to be marginalized further, he was setting her up to be free.

This woman went back to town and told all the people about her encounter with Jesus. And they responded by flocking to him by the thousands and listening to his stories for two days.

They did this because a woman they couldn't stand came to tell them the Messiah was at the well? Like, she just said this and off they went - no longer an outcast but suddenly the most reliable source of Savior sightings?

No.

I will always believe it wasn't her words they heard that prompted them to go to Jesus - it was the new life they saw in her. She was suddenly alive with freedom. It was her burdens no longer buried in a grave coming alive in an undisguisable way.

And the magnitude of that, because of her new life, thousands came to know and love Jesus in a way they never would have without this woman. Without knowing her in a new way.

I've had the Jesus encounter. Not with Jesus himself, but with someone I deeply admire. And in that encounter, I shared burdens that had been burdens for decades. Burdens I kept in a grave. Burdens that have begun to transform death to life.

I've heard it said that addiction thrives in secrecy. That's true. And so does anxiety and depression and loneliness and suicidal thoughts and hopelessness.

So does exhaustion.

It is the most painful of journeys, hiding your life from the life you're trying to live. And yes, you will turn to many things to dull that pain.

And then one day you have an encounter. And someone says I know your pain. I know your burdens. And you say, "what you have said is true."

You walk away from that encounter known.
There is no more beautiful state of life than known.
There is nothing that feels more alive than known.
And it leaves you longing for one thing more than anything else in life: known.

I know that's my journey now: known.

But that journey is not an easy one. Jesus made it easy on the woman at the well. He said, I know your burdens. He opened the door to the pain she'd kept trapped inside. But she responded to the opening by racing through that door to new life.

We don't make it easy on each other to share burdens. We too often use burdens against one another to imprison, not to release.

But when you find that one person, or a circle of friends, or a church small group, or a trusted family member. When you can find just that one place to experience the opportunity to say, these are my wounds - it is I myself - it's then that you suddenly stop waiting for release. You start breaking your way out of the prisons you've trapped yourself in. Whether people want you out or not.

It's then that you start seeing your own burdens with a clarity you've never seen them with before.

It's then that the life you've hidden starts to hold hands with the life you're living.

Life isn't always pretty on the other side of bringing your burdens out of the grave. But there is a beauty in being known that will never be found in being pretty.

There is new life that can never be found in the grave.

I am not an expert on the best way for anyone to show someone else their wounds. I'm not. I've butchered that one my whole life. But I am an expert on the new life that comes on the other side of showing them.

I am the woman at the well.

I no longer long for hiding, I long for living. I long for known.

I long for "it is I myself."