You Are Now Free to Be Touched

Welcome to your Exodus. A time of new beginnings; life as you've never experienced it before. See, a virus so small it can only be measured in microscopic portions, has rendered a sentence of imprisonment so huge it can't adequately be measured by our feeble minds.

Yes, a dust-like particle reshaped the way we do every day life and has made a name for itself in our history books. And somehow, locked down in the pressure cooker of our own isolation, we managed to revive a more heinous and familiar villain colored by fear and ignorance of innumerable ages.

And now enters our wilderness experience; complete with the highly trending not-so-new enemy - the mask. Nobody used to like masks, literally or metaphorically. Masks are meant to dull our senses, and they're pretty good at it. So while the mask smothers some of our senses, the other senses fight to be fed. Our eyes become hungry for something to satisfy them, so we smile and snap a pic for the response of others. Our ears long for some hot topic or noteworthy hope, so we say what we want to hear, and it feels good... for a little while. But our strongest sensory gland suffers the worst kind of bondage; when you're not bound but you're not quite free. Our skin.

Our hands are free, but we're forbidden to touch one another.

We are bombarded with sound bytes about the cares of this world. We're peering suspiciously over masks in to the eyes (windows to the soul) of others who were created to be touched. Touched by God, touched by love and touched by one another. As I press the keys now, my 4-year old is nuzzling my shoulder with her nose, rubbing my arm softly and occasionally laying her cheek upon my cheek. Does hearing that make you want to run to the nearest sink to wash your hands while singing the alphabet? Probably not. What is happening to our sense of touch?

In the bible, sometimes the word touch refers to "presence" or "healing" (Mark 10:14-16; Matthew 8:3). Other times, it means to be "violently seized upon" (Daniel 10:10). Either way, a touch from God should leave us altered, changed and forever awakened. At the very least, a touch should demand our attention.

No doubt about it, God has touched humanity in 2020. But has He gotten our attention yet? Has something inside of you been altered and forever awakened. When it happens, you'll know because you'll long to touch him back. And James 4:8 provides the only washing that makes a difference in this life, and the next.