JR. Forasteros - October 31, 2021

The Strength to Love

Journey to Love

Love comes easy to some of us. But for a lot of us, being more loving is really hard. It's scary to be more vulnerable. To risk reaching out. But the thing about love is that it is inevitable. If we just keep going, we'll find it. So how do we find the strength to love?

From Series: "Journey to Love"

Our deepest human need is to love and be loved. Despite - or maybe because of - this fact, we are often not good at giving or receiving love. In this series, we'll explore the nature of love and what it means to receive love so that we can learn to love well. Join us as we embark upon this journey to love!

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Can we talk about exorcising the devil? (It’s going to get weird, but not in the way you think.)

Last summer, self-proclaimed Neo-Nazis staged at march in Charlottesville, WV. It was a watershed moment for many white Americans. For some reason, the fact that in 2017, hundreds of torch-bearing Neo Nazis could assemble and march was the proof that finally convinced many of us of what our fellow citizens of color had been saying for generations: America has never solved our race problem.

But the reality was that, though many of us were finally ready to admit we had a serious problem, no one seemed to know what to do about it. The evil of systemic racism just seemed too big, and there were so many opinions – everything from ‘burn it all down and start over’ to ‘maybe just go back to ignoring it and hope it will go away’.

The reaction to Charlottesville followed the same pattern as pretty much every other major conflict in recent memory, from school shootings to what to do about the Dreamers to even what news sources are trustworthy. A few of us write major opinion pieces (or find one we like) and share it on social medial, sparking a war of words waged in the comments following. The rest of us just sort of step away from social media for a few days and watch cat videos until the hubbub dies down.

Deep down, we’re all painfully aware that we as individuals aren’t actually going to do much of anything to solve these problems.

Even if our opinion on this particular issue is 100% right (and let’s be real: which of us can honestly claim that?!), we’re not presidents, congress persons or even state reps. We’re regular, everyday people without much influence outside our immediate circles.

And these evils seem so overwhelming, so big, so impossible they’re the one place we’re willing to say are “demonic”. Even for the more skeptical among us, it’s not hard to believe there’s something insidious behind school shootings, racial oppression and our general sense of insecurity. It would explain our feeling of powerlessness, our sense of being small cogs in a big machine that’s bent on doing us harm.

Let’s explore the Satanic roots of big, systemic evil. And more importantly, we’re going to see how this Satanic evil has been cast out, how it’s being cast out today and how we can cast it out wherever we find it.

God’s way to defeat the big evils in the world is through small acts of faithful sacrifice. 

While none of us can tackle the big evils, we can all choose to be faithful and act sacrificially in small ways every day. We can all be a community that pushes back the darkness, that casts out evil.

Join us Sunday as we learn how small acts of love conquer evil.

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