Undaunted by Christine CaineSample

If we trust God with our broken and wounded hearts, then he will bring healing, restoration, and wholeness. He takes the weak, the marginalized, and the oppressed and makes all things new. What someone else would leave for broken, he sees as beautiful. He sees us beyond where we are; he sees us as who he created us to be. That’s the pattern of God I see in his Word. It’s the pattern I see in the story of the lame man who was begging at the temple gate called Beautiful. The man had been lame from birth. When other babies were taking their first steps, he did not. When other kids were running and playing, he could not. When teenagers were working alongside their parents, learning a trade, he could not. His muscles would have been atrophied, his limbs shriveled, distorted. Much like our souls are from the time we’re wounded. We know that he was dependent on others to carry him from his home to the temple area, up fifteen steps to the gate, and place him there in front of it. The routine was set, the plan was set, the system was set, and everyone acted according to the expectation. When we expect and accept that this is how things will always be, we build our lives around daily rituals that enable and ensure the life we have settled for. Because of his condition, he was not allowed to enter beyond the gate. He was ostracized, marginalized, discarded, and overlooked. He was someone society would have seen as ugly and labeled undesirable. The people entering the temple to pray at three in the afternoon would have noticed him—every single day. God chose to put the story of someone like this—someone who physically wasn’t easy to look at—in his inspired and holy Word, and the story took place in front of a gate called Beautiful. What irony. That gate was strategically placed between two courts. The first court, where everyone entered, was inside the wall surrounding the temple—the holy ground of the outer court. On the other side of the gate called Beautiful was the inner court—the place of prayer and worship, the place of the presence of God. The lame man was doomed to stay there, sitting outside against the massive doors of the gate, sentenced to a life of brokenness, until Peter and John came along. Until God extended to him an invitation. The lame man asked for money. Peter responded, “Look at us!” He sought to dignify, value, and humanize this man by asking him to look at them. And the man had the courage to look at them, to look up. To change his perspective from being low to the ground, staring at his misery, to looking heavenward, where healing and miracles come from. “Silver or gold I do not have,” Peter said, “but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” I love this story because it shows that we often overestimate what people can do for us and underestimate what God wants to do for us. The man asked for money. Peter offered him healing. The man wanted a short-term solution. Peter offered him what he really needed—not pocket change but a life change. Isn’t that like God? To take what is ugly and make it beautiful? To reach out to us right where we are, where we seemingly don’t fit in, and heal us? To see beyond our crippled brokenness to all the potential he placed inside us? When Peter told the lame man to get up and walk, the man obeyed. He made the effort to rise up. To move forward in faith. That’s all God ever asks us to do. Adapted from Undaunted: Daring To Do All That God Calls You To Do by Christine Caine. Copyright © 2019 by Christine Caine. Reprinted with permission of Zondervan Publishing. All rights reserved.