The Stadium of Scorn - A

Soul Snack 139/10 ...The Stadium of Scorn - Part A

A simple heart will always desire to give its best. A cantankerous soul will still expect the worse.

A small shell of a boy once lived amongst the poor villages of Africa. His frail frame and burn scars attracted a soul-piercing, daily derision from his peers. They weren't his friends, that fact they had made so painfully self-evident. He knew he had no friends.

Truly, this tender-hearted and wounded waif believed in his spirit and soul that he was beyond friendships.

It was the village square that had become his Stadium of Scorn. This was where all the children would gather to play when they were not in the fields. (There was no schooling.) In this Stadium of Scorn the brutal boys would assail his entire and forlorn being. His humble, dark and daub hut at the periphery of the square was his only refuge. The position of his dwelling was such a glaring metaphor to his brief life.

His short life-span had taught him that it was impossible to be liked by others and consequently impossible to like himself. He expected to never be understood, nor well received. He even lived accordingly. It was that cantankerous soul of his again. This he did not understand, nor could he at that tender age.

In the Stadium of Scorn, the Man of Sorrows witnessed this boy of sorrows. It would be the sadness of such prolonged sorrow that bred the courage and invitation to become a friend of the Man of Sorrows. The cantankerous soul that belonged to the Boy of Sorrows would soon find this out.

 

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Is 53:3)