Did He walk With You
Judah, so much like us
guided into disaster some how.
No control
No options
No recourse
How did you feel?
Were you certain?
Or were you screaming shame the whole way?
Was that pit of shame knotted in your stomach?
Did you turn around again and again on your journey?
Try to make your feet go the other way?
Were you thinking whether you wanted to throw away your sobriety?
Wondering why you were doing it.
Rolling that hard earned coin in your fingers.
Did you throw it away as you went, knowing already the certainty of your failure?
Were you morose with loss, before it even came?
As you turned away from your friends, mentors, guides, support,
did you agonize about how they would feel?
Wonder if they would blame themselves?
Did you have their words floating through your mind or were you ignoring them the way we all do:
thinking that it's not so bad, i can handle it.
While somewhere in the recesses of your mind you know
it isn't and you can't.
Were you torn and broken and angry?
Why should this task fall to you?
Why must you become the most hated man in christian history?
Did you wonder: why me?
Was your bread still lodged in your throat as you walked?
Unable to swallow the self loathing
and bitter hatred within you.
Were you sick along the way?
Emptying out the last vestiges of Grace,
of belonging, of certainty.
Was that small sack of ransom
sweaty in your hand?
Did it grow ever heavier as you walked?
Slipping from your fingers again and again,
re-adjusting, transferring it from hand to reluctant hand.
Did you want to take it and run?
Throw it in the ditch?
Give it to a beggar?
Return it and repent of your ways one more time?
Make it the last time?
Stand firm and let someone else bring history to its ultimate conclusion?
Did you try?
I have often wondered if God walked that road with you.
Took your hand and led you, led His Son,
to the slaughter.
Often wondered if you also were slave to Gods plan.
If you also drank of that bitter cup.
Were you also a sacrifice?
He saved you after all,
did he then leave you?
i don't think so.
Did you leave him?
i don't think so.
Perhaps He stayed with you, told you why,
asked you to carry this tiny enormous burden.
Perhaps you were never alone.
Perhaps you obeyed the command God gave,
and then He freed you of this world of misunderstanding
that would certainly have tortured you till your devastated end.
Perhaps now, outside of our flawed human understanding
you live in peace in paradise,
a martyr to the cause of saving humanity.
Loved and held by a God of Grace and mercy
Who had a plan.
Who has a plan.
For whom so many have suffered,
languished, and died.
for whom all of us can never understand.
Did you walk the same road we all walk?
Lost and found, captive and free,
hated and loved, wrong and right,
guilty and justified, dead and alive?
Did you go blindly, or did He help you see?
