“Unfinished”

A new song has captured me recently–“Unfinished” by Mandisa.  I was very quickly drawn into a spirit of worship by Mandisa’s lyrics and sound; and now, after an interview I watched on my daughter’s Ipad last night, I’ve become even more impacted as I’ve learned the story behind her newest work.  Over the past several years, she has been in a deep depression, such a depressed state that she said she had seriously considered suicide more than once.  She said that there was this little voice that kept telling her to just do it and then she would be right there with Jesus–and all of her hurt and pain would finally be over.  The life event that had put Mandisa in such a state was the death of her beloved friend from breast cancer–the friend behind her song “Overcomer,” a song that God has used to minister to so many cancer patients, patients like me.  I was so proud of the transparency that I saw in my sister of the faith.  She was so very real about her struggles and, in being so, she has freed many others to be real as well.

As I discussed all of this with my tween daughter, she seemed genuinely shocked and she asked me how someone like Mandisa could ever feel this way–her faith is so strong and God has given her such a powerful gift that has impacted, and continues to impact, so very many.  I told my little girl that not a one of us is immune to that joy-stealing voice that wants so much for us to take the ultimate control of our life down here into our own hands.  Even Jesus the Christ, when he lived here in the flesh, was told by that same mocking, thieving voice to throw himself down from a most high place.  In the book of Luke, Chapter 4 and verse 9, it says, “And he (the devil) took him (Jesus) to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.”  Yes, the enemy tried to persuade even our Christ to decide the exact moment his life down here would end.  So, if the very Son of God was subjected to such things, then the rest of us are certainly fair game.

Today, as I remember where I was exactly six years ago–in a transplant unit receiving stem cells–I find myself awed by how good God is; and I say this not because I got well when so many others didn’t, but because we have a God who is all good yet willingly chose to take on all the bad this fallen world has to offer.  Thus, when we do suffer and feel as if darkness is closing in all around us, we can know that God, through his Christ, has felt it too; we can know we are not alone.  And we can know that, just as Mandisa sings, we may be unfinished now but God’s plan most certainly is not–there are no holes in his plan, a plan which has indeed been hatched; it is done-the cross has saved us.  And we must hold on to this reality and allow it to drown out those hateful voices that may come again and again…..but only until Jesus comes.  When that happens, those voices will be finished; and so will we, but in just the right way.