Thanks! Here it is!
11 This is the testimony in essence: God gave us eternal life; the life is in his Son. So, whoever has the Son, has life; whoever rejects the Son, rejects life. (1 John 5:11-12, The Message)
Even when I was walking with Jesus for many years, I had somehow failed to receive the life He intended for me. I’ve been trying to tell you how He gave me that life, by healing the deep wounds I lived with.
I was asking Jesus why and how what he did was different than psychotherapy to help me confront the pains of my past. As it happened, I had just watched a scary Halloween episode of Dr. Who (“The Empty Child” with the 9th doctor, for you Dr. Who fans) where some alien nano-bites had tried to repair a little boy killed in the blitz in London during WW II.
But they fouled up, they brought him sort of back to life physically, but they didn’t know much about human physiology and thought his gas mask was part of his face, so they organically grew it into his skin to where he didn’t have a face, just a gas mask.
He began to transmit this new DNA to everyone he touched as he stalked the London streets looking for his mother, so everyone was terrified of this mutant boy who could turn you into a gas mask zombie.
But when his mother found him and embraced him, the nano-bites realized their mistake (comparing her DNA to what they’d done to the boy) — and they fixed him. They restored him (and all the other zombies) to what they were supposed to be.
I think Jesus was telling me it’s like that with us. We get busted up, and we try to fix ourselves as best we can. We can’t heal our wound, so we work around it — and we don’t even realize the disastrous way we’ve altered our true selves.
When He embraces us, then we’re repaired and restored to the way we ought to be. Then we can have this life of which John speaks, the true life, who we were meant to be!