Why Do We Resist It?
by Donavon L Riley
In the culture of sunlight and straight teeth, no one wants to fall. But sooner or later, every man and woman stumbles onto some dark battlefield—sometimes behind their own ribcage. The wound comes. No one escapes it. It slips like a blade into the sinew: betrayal, loss, despair. For some, it is failure—a snapping tree, once mighty and proud, toppling to earth. For others, an emptiness—a field in winter with no tracks in the snow, no birds wheeling overhead. This place terrifies us because it marks the end of ourselves, the death of our pretending.
And yet, it is a strange and wondrous thing—that God would build His cathedral not of flesh unspoiled, but of ruin. The vaulted halls are shattered; the ribs of the dome hang open like hands spread wide, letting light pour in through the fractured ceilings. It is there that we learn what the desert fathers knew: kenosis—the letting go, the holy emptiness—is the gate through which fullness enters. And so we bow lower, trembling, because He has placed His throne there.
Is it astonishing? Yes. And even more, that we fight it so furiously. Like wounded animals, we twist from the hand that seeks to mend us. We bury the wound under distraction, success, self-medication, anything. We rage against the fracture, blind to the hope that shimmers just beyond it.. The wound terrifies us—but it is there that transformation stirs, there that we catch the edge of something golden, unearned.
The only question worth asking, then, is why we resist it. Why do we guard our wreckage like misers, fists clenched around the dust? What would happen if, instead, we stilled ourselves in that dark hour and looked? If we stopped scrambling to patch the gash and dared to let our eyes rest on what shines there? We might remember what the ancients knew—that the hands of God are never so skilled as when they are remaking what has been broken. That His glory burns brightest in the ruined places we fear to touch.