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Finding understanding in a painful situation

3 min read

We have been in the process of building a hoop barn recently.

We bought a few extra cows this spring, so we needed extra round bales of hay to feed them this winter. That means that we need more space in the barn to store them, and that means we would have to leave some of our equipment outside without this barn.

My husband measured out the space needed and set the poles in concrete. He framed up the outside walls and put the tin on them. He set the anchors on top of the walls on which the curved trusses rest. For the installation of the three-piece trusses, he called on my son, daughter and I for assistance.

Using a JLG – a piece of equipment with a bucket that can, among other things, be raised up in the air where a ladder cannot be supported – to raise the center piece, we attached it to the one side that had already been attached to its anchor. The third piece had to first be raised so that the upper end could be inserted into the opening of the center piece before the bottom could be set to rest on its coordinating anchor.

It was hard work.

Each piece weighed probably 50 pounds. Trying to raise the one end up into the air was challenging, and then pushing all three pieces to be able to lift the lower end up high enough to set it on the anchor was worse. We had to break it up into several evenings over the course of a week because it was so tricky and time consuming.

Somewhere in the middle of the process, I jumped down from the wall to go grab the next piece needed when I felt a terrible pain in my left foot. I looked down and saw that I had landed on a nail sticking up out of a board. I jumped again and sat down to clutch my foot. It bled pretty badly, but I was able to finish the last truss of that evening. By the time I got back to the house, my foot was throbbing. All I wanted to do was elevate my leg and take some ibuprofen.

But all I could think about was Jesus.

How as Christians we believe he willingly took nails – far deeper into his flesh than the one that penetrated mine – for crimes he never committed. It truly struck me as I swabbed my injury and wrapped it up how much worse it would have felt to have been forced to leave the nail inside of my foot, while the full weight of my body bore down.

How excruciating his pain must have been, and what kind of love that must be to have endured it for people he hadn’t even met yet. To bear not only the nail through his feet, but the ones in his wrists along with the open wounds from the whip across his back speaks to a commitment beyond my comprehension.

It took a few days to be able to walk normally, and even now, nearly two weeks later, there is still a sore spot on the bottom of my foot. But the depth of the discomfort I felt pales in comparison to the depth of comfort I’ve found in this new understanding of Jesus’ sacrifice for my soul.

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