With Arms Wide Open

With Arms Wide Open

There are so many times in life when the hurt, discouragement, anxiety, and pain can cause us to disengage from the world around us. In these moments, we can find ourselves alone with our thoughts and overwhelmed by the feelings those thoughts bring.

What can we do about it? We can shift our thinking away from ourselves and reengage with our world by living our lives with our arms wide open.

Even though this is true, most of us won't. Instead, we simply close our own arms to those around us. The question we should ask, or perhaps consider, is whether this helps.

I believe the answer we may find is that closing ourselves off from our world and the people in our lives rarely, if ever, brings healing.

In fact, this can lead us to isolation, which in most cases makes matters worse.

So, rather than closing ourselves off, what if we lived our lives with our arms wide open, taking the same position Jesus took when He denied Himself and went to the Cross to bear our sins?

Would our feelings of hurt and pain disappear? Perhaps not, but I believe that when we live this way, we will find warmth in the embrace we can only receive when we live with our arms wide open!

John

Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”