Daily Devotional For Saturday, May 17, 2025
Good morning or good day whichever it might be for you. Taylor Swift has made a name for herself in the music industry. In her song, “This Is Me Trying,” she has this lyric: “And it's hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound.” Maybe instead of the world party, you might use the word, “home, work, or church.” Ever walked around or went somewhere feeling like an open wound? Look at Jeremiah 30:17, “For I will restore you to health, And I will heal you of your wounds,’ declares the Lord” (NASB).
Isaiah 53:5 says, “He was wounded for our rebellious acts. He was crushed for our sins. He was punished so that we could have peace, and we received healing from his wounds” (GWT). The Bible says that Jesus' wounds heal our wounds. Life is so unfair. It takes the life of a young child through cancer or car wreck. It cripples another through a freak accident. Even though we know that life is unfair, we still do not like it. Yes life is unfair, but there are times we want to say or even yell, “Why God aren’t You fair?” When bad things happen to bad people and even other people, we may not even think about it for more than a second. But when bad happens to us or someone we love, we get obsessed with the wound and pain it causes. We get possessed with one word, “Why?”
With us trying, we still get wounded and it is hard to party when we are wounded. Some move beyond the bad, the wound and the pain with God’s help and the help of others and some never do. They get stuck there thinking this will forever define them and keep them a prisoner. As I write this, I think of a story Max Lucado tells in one of his books about a young woman named Rebecca who got stuck in her wound:
“Rebecca Thompson fell twice from the Fremont Canyon Bridge. She died both times. The first fall broke her heart; the second broke her neck. She was only eighteen years of age when she and her eleven-year-old sister were abducted by a pair of hoodlums near a store in Casper, Wyoming. They drove the girls forty miles southwest to the Fremont Canyon Bridge, a one-lane, steel-beamed structure rising 112 feet above the North Platte River.
The men brutally beat and raped Rebecca. She somehow convinced them not to do the same to her sister Amy. Both were thrown over the bridge into the narrow gorge. Amy died when she landed on a rock near the river, but Rebecca slammed into a ledge and was ricocheted into deeper water. With a hip fractured in five places, she struggled to the shore. To protect her body from the cold, she wedged herself between two rocks and waited until dawn. But the dawn never came for Rebecca. Oh, the sun came up, and she was found. The physicians treated her wounds, and the courts imprisoned her attackers. Life continued, but the dawn never came.
The blackness of her night of horrors lingered. She was never able to climb out of the canyon. So in September 1992, nineteen years later, she returned to the bridge. Against her boyfriend’s pleadings, she drove seventy miles-per-hour to the North Platte River. With her two-year-old daughter and boyfriend at her side, she sat on the edge of the Fremont Canyon Bridge and wept. Through her tears she retold the story. The boyfriend didn’t want the child to see her mother cry, so he carried the toddler to the car. That’s when he heard her body hit the water. And that’s when Rebecca Thompson died her second death. The sun never dawned on Rebecca’s dark night. Why? What eclipsed the light from her world? Fear? Perhaps. She had testified against the men, pointing them out in the courtroom. One of the murderers had taunted her by smirking and sliding his finger across his throat. On the day of her death, the two had been up for parole. Perhaps the fear of a second encounter was too great.
Was it anger? Anger at her rapists? Anger at the parole board? Anger at herself for the thousand falls in the thousand nightmares that followed? Or anger at God for a canyon that grew ever deeper and a night that grew ever blacker and a dawn that never came? Was it guilt? Some think so. Despite Rebecca’s attractive smile and appealing personality, friends say that she struggled with the ugly fact that she had survived and her little sister had not.
Was it shame? Everyone she knew and thousands she didn’t, had heard the humiliating details of her tragedy. The stigma was tattooed deeper with the newspaper ink of every headline. She had been raped. She had been violated. She had been shamed. And try as she might to outlive and outrun the memory … she never could. So nineteen years later she went back to the bridge.
Canyons of shame run deep. Gorges of never-ending guilt. Walls ribboned with the greens and grays of death. Unending echoes of screams. Put your hands over your ears. Splash water on your face. Stop looking over your shoulder. Try as you might to outrun yesterday’s tragedies—their tentacles are longer than your hope. They draw you back to the bridge of sorrows to be shamed again and again and again. If it was your fault, it would be different. If you were to blame, you could apologize. If the tumble into the canyon was your mistake, you could respond. But you weren’t a volunteer. You were a victim” (Source: Max Lucado, He Still Moves Stones, pp. 23-25).
Assignment: This week be sensitive and look for a “Rebecca Thompson” or a “Robert Thompson.” They are in every school, supermarket, work place, on every cross-city trail and in every church. You have to ask the Holy Spirit to give you a discerning heart to be perceptive of a person with such a deep wound. Once you have found them, please let God use you to keep them from going back to their “bridge.” If you are a “Rebecca Thompson,” get help. Jesus Christ wounds will heal yours. It may take some time, but you can have an abundant life in spite of your wound. You can either let your wound define you or you can let Jesus Christ take that wound and redefine you in a new and different way.
Scripture To Meditate On: 1 Peter 2:24, “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed” (NASB).
Prayer To Pray: “Dear Lord, give me eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to feel another person’s wound they are carrying. Please work through me to help that person never return to their “bridge” and live the abundant life You promise. In Jesus’ name, Amen!”
I love you Southside! – Pastor Kelly