Archive for Moving Forward

Resurrection

{ July 28, 2009 @ 8:20 pm } · { Breaking Free, Life, Moving Forward, Ramblings, Spirtual, depth }
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Summer is winding down, and the best thing for me this summer was coming to the realization that God is all about resurrection. 

Let me elaborate. 

When anything goes wrong according to our plans or whatever you want to call it, the same phrase is always said, “well maybe some good can come of it”.  I loathed this statement for so long, I mean really hated it.  I had heard it during a time when I decided that the world was out of control and I questioned whether this omniscient God I had learned about on a flannel board, knew what he was doing when he breathed life into dust, or left noah to reinhabit the earth. 

I was completely bitter that: my friend died, that my grammy dealt with chronic pain all her life, that the gap between wealth and poverty grows still, that there is so much injustice in the world, that my addictions and struggles consistently haunted me, that we seem to hurt people out of our own insecurity, that divorce plagues so many families.  Am i missing anything?  The list is long and painful.
When you break it down my frustration was with the brokenness of the human condition, it seemed to me that since the fall of man, this cycle of sin had taken over pushing us further from God who is life, and so in that slowly dieing. 

I began to question why I even believed in God, why Jesus’ life was so revolutionary.  Why had people who experienced the same thoughts and fears found hope in this man.  I had no peace, I mean I was having a hard time sleeping.  This was a big problem I withdrew from people. 

Finally after months of this, I found peace in resurrection.
It seemed so simple i even felt ignorant for having overlooked something that was central to the faith i claimed to have.  Maybe I hadn’t overlooked it as much as I had neglected to allow the resurrection to penetrate every aspect of my life.  I had neglected this part of the story labeling it irrelevant to me…. I mean i haven’t died…

So there i was just sitting there experiencing the life of Jesus seeing it unfold and the power of resurection hit me like a train.  I mean this is it this is why there is hope, God can turn death into life.  I was so mad that someone i loved died unexpectedly but God raises the dead.  The dieing world will be raised to life one day. 

I have no reason to be bitter because God loves so well he can change even the most terminal conditions into good.  And i know he can because he did with Jesus and does all the time in ways maybe we can’t even see.
You see the truth is i was at a point where I wasn’t sure I could have faith in God anymore, and well a God that is all about resurrection, I can have faith in him.  I can love him, and I can serve him.  A God that will raise me from the dead I can have faith in that.

And the results of that are peace.  And on the coatails of peace comes hope. 

And then it hits you.

{ June 2, 2008 @ 11:30 pm } · { Moving Forward }
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I have come to realize that somehow life happens and there are times when certain things in life occur and at the time you can’t really comprehend what is going on and then it hits you.
Sometimes it feels like actual pain, your throat swells shut and you’re trying to breathe through a tube you swear has shrunk to the size of a straw, your chest tightens and a knot forms in your throat, you’re face gets hot and you feel the tears working so hard to escape your eyes. You fight it of course, and start swallowing incessantly, breathing deeper, opening your eyes to maximum capacity in an attempt to keep whatever emotion you’re feeling from escaping your body. But eventually you get tired of fighting it and the dam breaks down and rushing out comes you’re reaction. you realize that prior to this you’ve shut down and can’t really feel, anything. You’ve distracted yourself from reality in whatever way you can, all in an attempt to escape. You’ve filled you’re life up with things, work, partying, cleaning…whatever it is there are always things to do…but it always seems to hit you.

What hits you? well it could be anything, you realize you’re not the person you want to be, you don’t know what you believe, your grandmother is dieing, your friend was killed in a car wreck, you’ve been forgotten, you have no plans for the future, you really screwed things up in that relationship….how is it that we make it through these times and don’t really feel much, but then one day when we least expect it something triggers, and all the pain we’ve felt, the guilt, the fear, the hurt comes rushing out of us,leaving us feeling drained and  measuring up far shorter then we’d planned.

I had one of those days today, I was reading a book and in the end a girl dies in a car wreck she has major head trauma and her brain no longer responds to anything and she dies. This reminded me so much of an experience I had last year, when my friend was killed in a car wreck, I felt like i was experiencing the pain and shock for the first time again. I sat in my room wondering if it was because I didn’t live in the moment, if i’m being over emotional, or if its just natural. But how could it just be natural to fall apart? It made me wonder if maybe this happens because all those things I talked about, as humans we were never meant to experience, so when pain comes into our lives stealing from us goodness, we are at a loss for how to react. Maybe humans and pain were never meant to coexist.  Which I guess could leave us feeling hopeless since we obviously do experience pain.
I’ve come to realize in my limited experience that life is a series of actions and reactions. So in that we always have a choice, I guess I take comfort in the fact that no matter what happens I have a choice as to the way i’m going to react, the way i’m going to live, and ultimately the person i’m becoming. There is so much power and life in the fact that no matter what pain we endure we have the choice to forgive, we have the choice to turn around and instead of reacting with bitterness and hate, to react with love and compassion. In this we find the very foundation of hope.  there is something we can do
The stories that change, and inspire us are the ones where the mother forgives the man who killed her son, where the father welcomes home the son thats abandoned him, the man gives his life to save the person he didn’t even know, the child that respects his parents even though they are abusive.
This is the choice we face, the choice that manifests itself in small ways, but ultimately determines the outcome of humanity. That in the midst of the chaos, and carelessness, we have the ability to reverse the cycle of hurt. We possess somewhere in us the power to take all thats happened, all the pain, hurt guilt, hate, bitterness, and fear gather it up and with all the emotion and the reaction it provokes making the decision to use it in the reversal of the damage that has been done. To actually begin to cure the disease that we are a part of. This is the message of Jesus, that his kingdom is opposite of what we find ourselves in, its irrational, don’t repay evil with evil , its a concept so simple, but world changing.

So when it hits me, I want to be a person who takes all the energy and emotion it creates in me, and with that create something beautiful, instead of something equally as damaging as what caused the pain i experienced. This is moving creation forward to me, and bringing God’s kingdom here…thats all, getting late sorry if it’s scattered