The Stranger

How do you part with a broken heart?
Can love really last with a painful past?
What do you do with a soiled sense of self?
Do you despise her or deny her? 
Or do you embrace this beautiful 
“stranger within thy gates,”
this weary wilderness wanderer. 
Cleanse her feet of hurt and dirt—a tarnished reputation,
fraught with lies you believed were true.

“It was never you.”

But the rocks they threw had your mistakes engraved on it,
And the taunts harass and shatter like glass
the hopes that you had, 
your faith in good gone bad,
rotting like fruit on the ground.

But looking down on it all, in humility, you see
A man writing in the sand.
Could it be grand?
Your name written in heaven?
The promise of a new life—spiritually leavened?
Life in Christ is the real you. Lies are never true!
Christ’s love is the wounded’s Redeemer.

So what of this stranger and how to embrace her?
(But they caught her in the act and showed her everything she lacked!
Not allowed to move forward, but please don’t look back.)

The Christ is the stranger’s Saviour.
The Son of God, sent from above
“the living beauty of Love.”
Being made over is being made new, 
But new is a revealing of how the Creator made you.
Lies and Christ,Truth, there cannot be two.
Only one exists in His presence.
Eternally pure and sinless--
“the enduring, the good, and the true.”
It brings sweet release—“Daughter, go in peace.”
 
Copyright 2024 by Lindsey A. Roder


"Cleanse every stain from this wanderer’s soiled garments, wipe the dust from his feet and the tears from his eyes, that you may behold the real man, the fellow-saint of a holy household."
(Mary Baker Eddy's autobiography Retrospection and Introspection Ret. 86:11–14)

"The spiritual significance of this command, “Raise the dead,” most concerns mankind. It implies such an elevation of the understanding as will enable thought to apprehend the living beauty of Love, its practicality, its divine energies, its health-giving and life-bestowing qualities, — yea, its power to demonstrate immortality. This end Jesus achieved, both by example and precept."
(Ret. 88:10)

"Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts."
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy
(SH 261:4)

JOHN CHAPTER 8
Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

¶ Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

(John 8:1–12)