Seven Statements from the Cross • Week 2 • Saturday

Someone Reached for Me

Statement II — Week 2 Wrap-Up • A word from Lance

I want to be honest with you about this week (well I am honest all weeks). This one hit somewhere personal. These all do because they are either directly something my family and I are going through or close friends and family that we see going through the tough times.

I have been in seasons where I was the one falling (and still am constantly. Where the isolation was doing its quiet work and I was too proud or too ashamed or too convinced that nobody would understand to let anyone close enough to see what was actually happening. I kept showing up. I kept performing the version of myself that people expected. And underneath it I was coming apart in ways I would not have known how to explain even if I had tried.

Someone reached for me in one of those seasons. I am not going to get into the details here because it is not only my story to tell, but I will say this: I would not be writing these words without that reach. I did not deserve it. I had not asked for it. They just noticed something, and they showed up, and they said: I have been here too.

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That is the shape of Statement Two. Jesus on the cross turned sideways to a dying man not because the man had offered him something useful but because the man was in it and Jesus understood from the inside what that felt like. He reached not from a position of safety but from the same suffering. That is what made the reach land.

We have all survived something. A marriage that nearly broke. A season of financial wreckage. A depression that came slowly and then all at once. A grief that made us go quiet for months. We survived those things. And the thing we survived is not just ours to keep.

Someone is sitting next to us right now in the same storm. They are not going to ask. They are going to go quiet and hope nobody notices, the same way most of us did. The reach has to come from us.

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If this week stirred something and you know exactly who you need to reach for, trust that. Do not wait until you have the right words. Do not wait until you feel qualified. Send the message. Knock on the door. Pull them aside after the service. Show up with your scars and let them be useful in someone else’s hands. That is the whole thing. That is enough.

God loves our progress, not our perfection. If we went quiet this week when we should have reached, that is not the end of the story. Get back up. The reach is still available.

See it from God’s seat. Nobody survives alone by accident. Stay in step with the Spirit.

— Lance

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