What He Went Through

When I was up at my parents cabin this past weekend, I was making a fire down on the beach for the boys. I was pulling some old decking wood out of a pail to put it on the fire when three huge splinters went into my finger! The biggest of the three splinters went into my skin and poked out the other side....suffice it to say i was in a LOT of pain. I got a needle and tried to pry them out, but the force with which they had gone in had shoved them really deep inside the skin. I was almost in tears at that point and my dad drove me into town to get some numbing gel to try and help with the pain while I perfomed my "little surgery" on my finger to get these splinters out. I put the numbing gel on my finger, but it didn't really do all that much and I realized that in order to get the wood out, I was going to have to pierce the skin open, cut the skin covering the splinters open and then pull them out. After about a half an hour, I was able to bring myself to do it. I used a nail clipper to literally cut my skin open on my fingertip and it was bleeding, let me tell you! Then I pulled the splinters out, and they didn't come out on the first pull either. Do you know what I was thinking the whole time I was doing this? If the pain I am experiencing from cutting open a small section of skin on my finger open is SO painful, I can only imagine how painful it was for Jesus to go through all the whipping and beating and pierced hands and feet that he willingly submitted Himself to for me and you on the cross? And yet..........He did it! He must have experienced 100,000 times that amount of pain, yet for the joy set before Him, He endured that cross. Oh, what love is this, that He would give Himself for me, little old me. But, He did!