JR. Forasteros - March 19, 2017
Faith vs. Feelings
All too often, we equate faith with feeling. If we don't feel God, we must lack faith. But true faith is trusting God's character and calling even when we don't sense God's presence. By responding in faith to God, we find a deeper faith than we thought possible.
From Series: "Lent is for Losers"
Too often, we think faith is about winning - getting our way in the culture or in our homes. But during Lent, we'll trace the human journey through the Old Testament and see that getting what we want never works out like we hope. We'll see how Jesus enters into our failure and becomes a loser just like us. Somehow, his failure is good news for us. It turns out God is for losers, which is good news for all us failures.
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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.
