Desperately broken. Deeply loved. Capable of creating hurt. Capable of creating beauty.

The gospel has us hold two stories that seem conflicting at once. Just like babies who developmentally can only hold one item at a time, we tend to want to hold one or the other, making an either/or out of God’s greatest both/and.

Maturity in the gospel, it seems, can be measured by our ability to increasingly hold both of these realities at once, both for ourselves and for others.

Just as in the garden, God left space in the newly minted (from his mouth) earthly paradise for Adam and Eve to choose to love him and trust him, the gospel leaves space for us to trust him by holding the two tensions of the gospel.

When we bifurcate these two realities, we are endangering ourselves and others.

If, when people fail us or hurt us, we immediately and forever label them as only desperately broken, we are truncating the gospel which hurts the heart of the God who gave it to us. We throw them in a pit that God climbed in to rescue them (and us) from. Similarly, if when we ourselves fail or fall into sin, we remember only the brokenness that remains in ourselves, we throw ourselves into the same pit.

If, on the other hand, we expect brothers and sisters in Christ (and ourselves) to perform perfectly. we place them on a pedestal on which only Christ belongs. Likewise, if we expect ourselves to perfectly perform in all our relationships and endeavors, we will be crippled and eventually paralyzed. If we think we are performing well, we will wreak of self-righteousness which wreaks to God. If and when we fail, we find ourselves drowning in the shame that Christ bore once and for all in His body on the cross.

I know this. I know you know this. But, at heart, I don’t know this, nor do we.

Every time I hurt someone or am hurt by someone in the body, which happens more often than I care to imagine, I am tempted to fall from the glorious both/and of the gospel into the bifurcated, binary system of either/or. Through my broken lenses, either they are bad or they are good, for me or against me (or my cause). They belong either in a pit or on a pedestal. When I get to these places, the Holy Spirit sends up a flair to the Father and puts me in gospel triage.

I cannot see the world and the height of his creation (humanity) through a lens that my Father does not. It goes against Christ-in-me and the gospel on which I depend and which I am to declare.

The only way I know how to get from the broken lenses of my flesh and my frailty to the glorious lenses of the gospel is to follow Christ’s journey from the heights of heaven to the pits of sin and shame and back up to the righthand of the Father from whence he came.

I belong in the pit. The person who wronged me belongs in the pit. The person who wronged and hurt the person who wronged and hurt me belongs in the pit. The pit is wide enough to hold all humanity.

But compassion for us in the pit and obedience to the Father compelled our Christ down.  He left the heights to join us on the globe he created, orbiting around the sun whom he sourced. He walked with broken and beautiful people who were desperately broken and deeply loved. In fact, he walked himself up the Hill of the Skull carrying a splintered beam on his beloved back to rescue us from our sin and shame. He sat in that pit for three days. And creation wept at the thought that the light of the world had been extinguished.

But then he rose. And in so doing, he created space for us to be both desperately broken and deeply loved. He climbed the pedestal that belongs only to Him, but he invites us to be wrapped in him and enjoy his privileged place.

I cannot hold someone, be it another or myself, in the pit when Christ raised us up with him. I cannot expect someone,  be it myself or another, to live up to the perfect standard that Christ came to fulfill.

This is the gospel. To believe this both/and for myself and others is the great fight of faith that the Apostle Paul wrote about. The more I believe it and receive it for myself, the more I will be freed to invite others out of pits or off pedestals. It will be a fight, and it won’t be easy, but it is worth it because Christ is worthy.