JR. Forasteros - December 20, 2015
Picking Up on the Clues
As we journey into the future, it's hard to know what to focus on - how do we know what will be important before we see the whole picture? Part of faithfulness is learning to discern the clues.
From Series: "What to Expect When We're Expecting"
The future can be a scary thing – especially because it doesn’t come with a roadmap. But when God calls us, we rarely get all the details. How do we move forward faithfully when we don’t know where we’re going? Advent invites us to anticipate well, to look to our fathers and mothers as they longed for God’s rescue. Their stories teach us how to hope well and move forward faithfully.
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Today’s about Ghost stories. Though they appear in many forms, the quintessential ghost story involves the spirit of a dead person who’s stayed around (usually a haunted house) because they have unfinished business. Maybe they have to deliver a message or ensure proper burial or get revenge. Whatever the case, once their business is complete, they leave into the afterlife.
Unlike our previous two monsters, today we’re not ghosts. Rather, to quote Peter Rollins,
We are the haunted houses. — Peter Rollins
We move through life collecting hurts, wounds and scars, evidence of pain inflicted on us by other people. Some may be slight, exaggerated in our heads – maybe someone who cuts us off or says something cruel or who causes us harm by accident. Others could be huge, life-altering. A spouse who left. An abuser. And there’s a whole range of hurts between.
Whatever their source, however legitimate or not, these people, these hurts don’t just exit our lives.
We carry them around with us, in our heads and in our souls. They haunt us, returning again and again out of the ether to drag us through the past, to relive history, to reopen old wounds.
The problem is we don’t know what these ghosts want. We don’t know how to resolve their business and get them to leave us. We can’t escape their haunting – especially if the person who hurt you is still a part of your life.
