JR. Forasteros - July 15, 2012
Joshua - Where's the Manna?
While Israel wandered in the wilderness between the slavery of Egypt and the freedom of the Promised Land, God provided manna for them to eat every day. But after they arrived in the Promised Land, the manna stopped. Did this mean God abandoned them? No. It meant that they now had to start feeding themselves, using the bounty of the Land God had given them. This is a model for our Christian faith: when we first start out, as spiritual infants, God\\\'s presence is easy to sense, and everything seems easy. But God won\\\'t let us remain infants; we must grow up, learn to feed our own souls.
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Some of you may remember right before the pandemic when I had knee surgery. I had to put no weight on my knee at all for 2 weeks, and keep my knee elevated as much as possible. In practice, that meant I was laying on my back on our couch for 2 straight weeks – getting up only once or twice a day.
And if you think that sounds terrible, it was. But imagine how much worse it was for my wife. She was amazing – she made a whole basket of foods I could reach without having to get up, and before she left for work every day, made sure I had everything I needed – device chargers, remote controls, etc.
In the evenings, if I needed anything, she was quick to get it. She brought me meals, did all the dishes, did all the household chores. Now: I want to ask a hypothetical question (hypothetical because I’m not going to bring her up to the platform and interview her):
Do you think she wanted to do all that?
Like, let’s say I’d been out of town. Do you think she would have spent all her freetime doing chores? Do you think her heart’s deepest desire was to clean up after me and care for me while I was invalid?
Obviously not. She chose to do those things despite the fact that they’re not fun, and not what she would choose to do if she could do anything.
She chose to take care of me because she loved me.
Any of us who have had a friend, parent, kid, spouse or partner who was ill or incapacitated in some way knows what I’m describing.
There’s something about love that transforms otherwise disgusting or difficult. Love doesn’t make those fun – no one likes cleaning up puke – but somehow these acts of service become small in comparison to the love we have for the other person.
I want to talk about divine love, and I wanted to begin with that story of Amanda’s loving service because it’s in acts like that we most clearly see what God’s love looks like.
