Bearing the Reproach

Track sixteen is the communion song, the warmest and quietest thing in Movement IV. I have carried a reproach a long time now - the names, the shut doors, the cold yard, the camps that would not have me. And I used to think the reproach was mine, my own load to bear in the dark.

Then the song opens the Book on it, and the Book calls it something else. When I go outside the camp I go bearing His reproach. The reproach I thought was only mine was His reproach all along. That single reframe changes everything in the cold. The reproach is not a load I drag by myself - it is the very thing He carried, it is the bond between us now. My wounds and His wounds match. The cost, it turns out, was the communion.

And the song is careful about one thing, so I will be careful about it too. Do not hear me say I found another camp out past the gate. I did not join a thing. There is no fence and there is no roll. There is only Him, and me, and the same reproach across us both. It was never a camp. It was a Person. The bridge brings in Moses, who counted up the cost and called the reproach of Christ a greater treasure than all of Egypt - and the whole company of the campless and the homeless who, it turns out, were keeping Christ's own company the entire time. So let the reproach keep coming. I would not put it down, not for the warmest welcome in the world.