"I liked hearing from someone who had actually been through it"
Year 8 Pupil, St Georges School
Photograph: tamsin, greg, tim

Life bites

Something to chew on/ Life and God and stuff

Have you ever fallen? I mean really fallen. Have you ever had one of those heavy falls that leaves your knees bruised and knocks the breath out of you?

I have a few times.

When you fall it leaves a mark, often that mark can be seen; a cut on the knee or a nice big bruise. Then there are those marks that you can’t see but you can definitely feel. Every time you touch that spot or put pressure on it, it causes you to flinch. There is no visible mark but you haven’t yet healed from the fall you had.

We fall all the time, in different ways, surrounded by different people ending in different marks and different pain. And there is nothing wrong in having a fall, in admitting you have a mark whether visible or not.

The other day I fell over on my way to my friend’s house. I grazed my knee and was left with a big bruise for the next week. Now there is nothing left as a reminder that I fell apart from a small pain when I kneel down, but my knee is still recovering from that fall, there is still a small amount of healing to take place, even though there is no longer a visible mark.

If you pick up the Bible and start reading a story from it, you will often find that somewhere in that story there will be a character that has got something wrong, they’ve fallen and they are trying to find the best way to get up again. In John 8 there is a story about a woman whose church leaders found out she was having sex with a man who wasn’t her husband. This was a really serious crime and she found herself in a big mess. Those who were in charge had found out her about the secret that she was hiding and they now had the authority to sentence her to death because of it. This woman had fallen hard and had marks all over her that everyone could see.

The church leaders took this woman to Jesus to see what he would do. They thought he would agree with their plan to stone her but Jesus suggested that, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” He was saying; if any of you have never fallen over and done something wrong then you throw the stones. There wasn’t one who hadn’t ever done something wrong, all of them had fallen and so all they could do was walk away and leave the woman unharmed with Jesus. Jesus told her that no one could condemn her and she should go and live a life without doing wrong from then on.

We’ve all had a fall at some point but that doesn’t mean that we have to stay on the floor. I believe that we’ve all been given the choice to get back up and start again and there is someone who has made it possible for us to have this choice.

You may be sitting on the floor right now and you’re not too sure if you can stand up yet, if ever. Maybe the reason you ended up on the floor wasn’t even your fault and that makes the marks that you carry even harder to heal. But I want to tell you that you were not made to just sit down, you were made to stand up and walk. There is not one person around you that hasn’t fallen over, that hasn’t had to hold out their hand and asked to be pulled back up. So it’s okay, it’s okay to be a bit wobbly and carry a few bruises for a bit but the beauty of getting up is that as you walk you begin to heal.

In Isaiah 53 it talks about Jesus dying on the cross and what he went through for each one of us. He did that so that every time we fall, for whatever reason, we can get back up again and find healing.

He took the punishment, and that made us whole. Through his bruises we get healed. We’re all like sheep that have wandered off and gotten lost. ?We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way. And God has piled all our sins, everything we've done wrong, on him.

So maybe right now you need a little encouragement, you need a little help to stand up again. Let me tell you that it is possible, those marks that hurt now won’t last forever because the one who made you has fixed it already. You were created for greatness, you were created to shine!