Wrong. This never happens. And this never will happen. We have more access to entertainment than at any time in human history, yet somehow, we’re far less satisfied than when we’d spend half the evening driving to Blockbuster to pick out a movie, which we’d then watch twice over the weekend before having to drive back to the store to return it.

This paradox of our moment — having more choices yet feeling less satisfied — captures the essence of our struggle for control. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa explores this phenomenon in his short book The Uncontrollability of the World. The original German word unverfügbarkeit in the title is normally translated to “unpredictability,” but this failed to capture the emotional depth Rosa and his editor were aiming for. They instead landed on “uncontrollability,” a word that better captures modernity’s obsession and spiraling result of trying to make the world predictable, available, and disposable. Rosa explains his thesis:

The tremendously powerful idea that the key to a good life lies in expanding our share of the world has worked its way deep into our psychological and emotional life.

We’ve subscribed to the belief that if we can just bring more of the world within our reach and under our control, we’ll find the good life. The idea permeates every aspect of our existence, from toddlers mastering new skills to the elderly seeking security. It’s become the mantra of modern life, though it often goes unspoken: always act in a way that increases your share of the world.

But how’s that working out for us? There are apps that let us monitor our homes, control the temperature, and even see who’s at our door. But when the power goes out, all that control evaporates, leaving us more helpless than before. We’ve created a new kind of uncontrollability. Apps like Headspace, Calm, and Happify monitor our moods, but soon enough, that monitoring morphs into optimizing. Before we know it, we’re trying to control our emotions and natural body rhythms. Rosa argues that this relentless pursuit of control doesn’t lead to the good life, but rather burnout and a pervasive fear of burnout. We become numb to the world, unable to experience it in a way that resonates. As Rosa puts it, “The fundamental fear of modernity is fear of the world’s falling mute, of which burnout and depression are only timely expressions.”

This numbness bleeds into every part of life, especially parenting. Recently, the Surgeon General issued a warning about the pressures on parents today. At first, it sounded like satire — something straight out of the Onion mocking our culture’s fixation on mental health and over-therapization. I mean, where is this warning sticker supposed go — on bed sheets?? But reading the actual warning, a well of empathy begins to form. Not only are parents overwhelmed by the rising costs of childcare and the impossible maze of social media, but also the endless flood of information they’re supposed to both manage and master. Just this week, I received separate text messages about fluoride levels, radio frequencies, and forbidden foods for my own children. Behind each message was an expectation of understanding the argument and picking a side or else ending up on the wrong side of history … or worse, being labeled a bad parent. No wonder two out of five parents report feeling so overwhelmed they become numb. Our attempts to control have backfired, leaving us more anxious than before. The world is becoming cold and mute.

So where do we turn when our efforts at control have not only failed us but also created a worse form of uncontrollability?

Rosa suggests that instead of doubling down on more measuring and maximizing, we ought to instead discover resonance: a meaningful, responsive connection with the world around us. Resonance requires something outside of us calling out to us in some way. It can happen when you are compelled by a story, captured by a sunset, or moved by a song — anything that reaches out and touches you or causes abreaction. This movement leads to a form of transformation that you can’t cause or engineer. It is more than a psychological state or feeling and it can never be coerced or manipulated. Resonance is uncontrollable.

We see literal resonance in a tuning fork: when struck, the vibrations affect everything around it. Another tuning fork held up to the first will begin to respond in harmony. Or for those who ever played a sport to the point of exhaustion out of self-forgetful delight, resonance is like that “flow” state where in responding to the movement happening on the court or field, you become so immersed in the unfolding drama that you completely forget about yourself and your performance. Most players describe their peak performance in that state, but you can’t force your way in — it always just happens when it does.

Resonance finds its deepest expression in the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul describes Jesus as the rock that was struck in the desert to provide water for his people. Like us in the twenty-first century, the Israelites wandering the desert felt closed off from the world around them. The solution wasn’t to engineer a way out but to resonate with what God was doing by Moses striking the rock. They merely had to receive the water and be reminded of the God who was at work.

The good life is not about bringing more of the world within your grasp. Instead, it’s about being grasped by the one who gave himself for us. It’s about finding rest in the uncontrollable grace of God and being freed from the exhausting pursuit of control. In a world that demands more of our time, attention, and energy, the good life is Christ and him crucified.

What does this look like practically? It’s something like the simple children’s book The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. The child, experiencing snow for the first time, is captivated by wonder — even his own footprints in the fluffy powder draw him into a world of transformation and discovery. Like us, he tries to control and keep it, packing a snowball in his pocket for later, but it melts away while he takes a bath. The next morning, despite dreaming the snow would be gone, he wakes to a fresh covering of snow — a picture that God’s grace is not something we control but a gift that renews every morning, inviting us to resonate with what he’s up to in the world around us again and again.

The post Control is Overrated appeared first on Red Tree.

Laura advertises for VRBO, Chris gets shingles, Davis loses it on a road trip, and the three discuss Noah’s post-flood bender, achieving vs receiving, why loving God isn’t enough, and the wrong questions to ask about salvation.

Red Tree Readings: Genesis 9:18-29; Acts 1:1-8
This week’s “BUT WHAT ABOUT” Passage: Luke 18:18-23 (Rich Young Ruler)

You can learn more about Red Tree at redtreegrace.com

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

The post E31 The Cosmic Reset Button appeared first on Red Tree.

After he left, my wife and I couldn’t help but realize that soon enough that’ll be us, that someday we’ll come back and have the same conversation with younger owners, tearing up at the memories of raising a family there.

Change is an interesting thing. It can be both good and bad. And I’m often struck by how uncomfortable yet unavoidable it is — almost like death, though not as dark, and with less fear attached to it. It’s maybe why we talk so much about the good old days, yet simultaneously find ourselves unable or unwilling to see the inevitability of drifting away from them. Sometimes the only outlet, then, is longing and sadness, but also some healthy self-awareness that dips its toe into the theological.

If change seems inevitable for us, the opposite is the case for God, who is (to use a fancy theological word) immutable, unchangeable. And not only God but also the gospel itself – an unshakable promise that never changes or weakens. Time moves on, but we’re called more to remembrance than innovation. And yet, without even trying, we often “age” past the wooden rafters of the gospel and try to add to what’s been given. It’s ingrained in all of us. I was recently talking with some friends who were lamenting how they made the Christian life too complicated, and how their story was one of spiritual recovery back to simple, grace-based Christianity. I could relate.

I wonder if Jesus’ call to childlike faith in the Gospels isn’t simply a call to weakness and dependence (though it is), but also a call to simplicity. We get older in the faith, and often with age comes the trap of thinking we know better than we used to. Going deeper into the love of God, as Paul prays for the Ephesians, is one thing, but qualifying or going past the love of God is another, and altogether dangerous. Love is the final frontier, you could say. It never ends. It always perseveres. There’s no uncharted theological land outside of it that needs to be explored. Grace is always the last word, so the way forward is down, beneath our feet. We’ve only begun to understand how rich, unending, and surprising God’s love is for us in Christ. But so much of our understanding of what growth and progress are has to do with novelty, and so it goes on and on, the cycle of thinking there’s more out there for us than what God called his final and fixed word of love in Hebrews 1.

I find solace in the fact that scripture’s “heroes” struggle with this — like Peter, whose unwillingness to dine with dirty gentiles brought into question how much he really believed God’s grace was enough. So, I cling to the anchor that Jesus died not just for my big bad sins, but my “faith sins” as well, those sins that operate from the shadows and seek to add to the grace that I know deep down is sufficient — “If I just ascended a little bit more, I think I could prove that I was worth saving.” But that way of living ages me swiftly and leads me not only to forget the beauty of the gospel but also to change it into something it’s not, into some awful hybrid of law and grace, which, Paul says in Romans, then ceases to become grace (Rom 11:6).

But God doesn’t age. And he’s more comfortable with repetition than we are. G. K. Chesterton once wrote:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy: for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Maybe, somewhere deep down, whether we realize it or not, the reason we’re overcome with emotion when walking into the old garages of our past is because the gospel is in there somewhere. We change and fluctuate in our sin, streaks of gray hair growing in over our ears. We wander. We forget. Many times our worst days are toward the end of our life rather than the beginning, even though others tell us that shouldn’t be the case. But then we smell the old wooden cross, and we remember that though our bodies break down, God’s love remains unchanged, and it’s ok to be a child in the faith. Grace really is free, though paid for at the highest of costs by Jesus. These things tend to elicit more and more tears with age — tears of joy and thankfulness, mixed with hope for a future when God will restore all things and bring our longings for permanence and eternal life to fruition.

The post An Ageless God, A Timeless Gospel appeared first on Red Tree.

Women’s ministry is a delicate subject. There’s a lot of good happening right now when it comes to building up women in the faith. We have more female authors who hold fast to biblical theology over feelings-based ministry than we’ve had in the past. There’s a welcome push in local churches to train women to teach the Bible and to lead. The problem is it’s often mixed with “fuzzy,” diluted theology that intends to draw out emotions but too often leapfrogs over the harder and messier parts of Scripture, which can make navigating theology confusing at best and distressing at worst. 

At the retreat I attended, this fuzziness mixed good things like reminders of how fruitless we are outside of the vine of Christ with not-so-good things like how we need to chase after Jesus (why is he running away in the first place?) and extensive “take home” lists on how we can do better to serve him in our daily lives. There were songs about how Christ promised to save us mixed with songs about us promising to choose him. All of these were wrapped in flowers and served to us as if they could fit in the same vase together and not choke each other out. Where’s the connection between getting a swag bag — free stuff! no strings attached! — and “Christian” teaching that sounds like anything but free?

And we wonder why women in the church are so exhausted. 

Throughout my life, I have been at the helm of a few different women’s ministries. I’ve been the one making the decisions about what we teach and what we send women home with. Looking back on it, I see how easy the trap is to fall into. I know that I too often offered self-help instead of Christ’s broken body, and platitudes instead of dependence on Jesus. It felt validating when women would tell me that they could use those things to become better versions of themselves. But I look back on it, as a woman who has been humbled greatly by a brokenness that uncovered self-reliance that posed as righteousness, and I cringe. My intentions were good. But now I see that if there were women in my care who were desperate like I am now, which there undoubtedly were, I may have been only rubbing salt in an open wound. I pray that God met them where I could not at that time in my life, and I trust that he did. 

It’s all too common to try and elevate women by urging them to be more like the women they see in the Bible. Be dependent on Jesus like Ruth, be firm in your faith like Esther, fight against evil like Jael, etc. These can be good things, but when they’re overemphasized, made into islands, or unhinged from Christ’s one-way love to us, they give us that hit of dopamine that doubles down on the belief that we’re something when we’re nothing, which is never a good thing. And the more we do it, the more we rely on our habit-building, our perfect church attendance, or our ability to give of ourselves unselfishly and unrestrained, the more white-knuckled our grip will become. Fatigue sets in, followed by panic, followed by desperation, followed by emptiness. And the thing about us humans is that we repeat this cycle endlessly, always believing that we’ll do better next time. I grieve just writing this, understanding how stuck in this cycle so many women are – myself included.

But what would it look like if we turned up the volume on where Scripture truly focuses our attention? Before we hold Ruth up as an example for us to emulate, the New Testament wants to proclaim over us how she’s a picture of Christ clinging to bitter and broken sinners like us the way Ruth clung to her bitter and broken mother-in-law. What if this good news was the first thing we wrapped around the women we serve, around ourselves? The ‘therefores’ we’re going to draw based on this view of Ruth will look far different because we’re not the main character, which is good news to bitter and broken people. It gives women joy, unadulterated joy, in knowing that Christ ran down the holy hill of his glory to pull them from the miry pit, and that kind of grace creates the space to come alongside them as they begin the life-long process of taking themselves out of the center of their universe and letting Jesus take the throne instead. Looking at Scripture this way reminds them, and us, that we will never graduate from the grace of God. That grace will always be what we desperately need. 

In the “women’s ministry of Christianity,” the swag bag of the gospel really is free and isn’t followed up by heavy-handed teaching or endless lists of high expectations for our post-conference spirituality. He’s the main subject of our lives, and of all Scripture, whether we fully live as though that’s true or not. And we never do. But thankfully, his generosity always trumps our impulse to pay him back. His scars speak a better word, one that invites us to sit at his feet and to receive from him grace upon grace (John 1:16).

The post Women’s Ministry and Too Much “Me” appeared first on Red Tree.

But recently, along with twenty other fellow believers, I’ve been taking a Biblical Theology class at my local church. Each week we approach a different genre of Scripture, seeking to understand how it illuminates Christ and his suffering (Luke 24:25-27). Last week, we looked at the five books of the Old Testament that comprise “wisdom literature” which to my surprise includes the Song of Solomon.

We read Chapter 2 in class, which is about a man going to great lengths to get to his bride. In verse 8 we read, “The voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes, leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills.” You feel the groom’s thrill in pursuing and moving toward his soon-to-be wife, displaying a longing and eagerness that refreshes the reader as we imagine ourselves in her place. It bids us to imagine “if only someone pursued me in that way.” But remember! This is a letter that is reflective of Jesus and the church, a love letter God wrote to his people. Instead of reading it as a how-to guide, or an old-fashioned story about traditional marriage, we get to read this as Jesus’s traveling at great lengths to get to his church, that is, this is the story of God’s very pursuit of you. Jesus didn’t bound over literal mountains and hills – he bound the chasm of heaven itself. He leaped down to earth to die for you to bring you back into his unending, never-breaking love.  

This passage could be re-written in a manner that depicts Jesus all the clearer:

The voice of my love, here he comes. Leaping over the greatest chasm, from heaven to earth, to be with us. He is full of grace, the perfect man. He has arrived and he is calling my name. 

He says to me, Get up, my love, the one I delight in, and come to me. For all the deadness of your winter has passed, it’s been nailed to the cross. And now, through my resurrection, life springs forth from the earth. Restoration of all creation is knocking at the door. The time to worship God forever is now here. Get up, my love, the one I adore, and come away with me. Do not hide, for there is no longer shame, but instead, come out in the open. I long to see your face, to hear your voice. 

I am yours and you are mine.

As I reflect on that truth, I think back to my twenty-something-year-old self and wish this was the picture someone would’ve painted for me, instead of telling me this book was off-limits until marriage. In that moment it felt as if I wasn’t worthy to read the book, when instead that is far from the truth! This book is a beautiful display of God’s intimacy toward his people and how sex is an illustration, not the fulfillment or purpose of love. Now, as someone who is married, this book bids me to see how marriage can’t be my God because my husband will not satisfy or fulfill the desires only God can fulfill. Marriage, and the Song of Solomon, is a reflection, pointing to a far more intimate and satisfying relationship, which is in Christ alone.

The post An Unexpected Love Letter appeared first on Red Tree.

For human beings, looking back on our past work or actions, cringing, and striving to do things better or differently in the future is a universal experience — like when an artist looks back on his or her earlier work with mild disgust. But when it comes to God, it sounds unlike him to think this way and maybe pokes a bit at our perceptions of his character, like his immutability or sovereignty. And yet, it’s this negative commentary that helps drive the story forward to its rightful climax in a way that a static, all-positive, “no problems here!” story can’t.

Though there are many places we can go to see this in the Bible, I like to pick up right in the middle, after centuries of covenant living are in the rearview mirror for Israel, and God begins to speak through the psalmists and the prophets. It’s during that time that David says, “Lord, you don’t desire sacrifice, but a broken heart.” Isaiah dials up the rhetoric further by saying (for God), “I don’t want your sacrifices, or your festivals, or your Sabbaths! I detest them!” and elsewhere “I live in heaven, not in temples built by human hands.” The attuned reader at this point might scratch their head and ask, “But, wait, didn’t God command these things to be kept and observed?”

When we get to the New Testament, we see this disconnect even more obviously with Jesus, whose freedom from the law reveals more than mere quibbles over interpretation. When it comes to the practice of Sabbath rest, Jesus proclaims himself its Lord (Mk 2:28), and even breaks it in favor of healing a paralytic (Jn 5:18). He refuses to throw a stone at the adulteress even though the law commanded it. He differentiates himself from Moses’s “Eye for an eye” and instead teaches his disciples to “Turn the other cheek.” He commends the faith of the unrighteous tax collector and scorns the righteousness of the Pharisee (Lk 18:9-14). He not only positions himself against the old ways but against things God himself spoke into existence. In this, David’s words become Jesus’s: “Father, you don’t desire these things anymore, you never really did, but I am here to do your will” (Ps 40:6-8, Heb 10:5-7).

Where I think we see this at the highest level, though, and where Jesus matches God’s Old Testament zeal over this matter, is when he flips over the money changers’ tables in the temple. Something often missed in this story is how Jesus sat down and “made a whip out of cords” before he drove people and animals from the temple, meaning that this wasn’t a spontaneous freak-out, but a calculated act that (at least temporarily) disrupted the entire sacrificial system of the day. An overreaction, you could say, if all he intended to do was to turn the dial 5 degrees or to “clean up” what was otherwise a good thing that was intended to last forever. Where was gentle Rabbi Jesus when you needed him? Wouldn’t a simple teachable moment have sufficed?

So, why is he doing this? Why is he flipping rather than teaching? The answer is that Jesus isn’t just overturning tables, he’s overturning eras. All due respect to the “temple cleansing” language we often use to summarize this Bible story, but I don’t think it does it justice. 

Jesus isn’t a small update to the operating system of the old covenant, but a new system altogether that renders the old obsolete (Heb 8:13). Between the two systems, the language is similar, some of the code persists, and the coder is the same, but they are as different as MS-DOS is from Windows 11 or the latest MacOS. 

It’s no coincidence that a few verses after Jesus flips the tables, he starts talking about his own body as the new temple and how he’ll raise it from the dead after it’s been destroyed. He’s signifying that he is the new way sinners will meet with and be mediated to God — not on the basis of our obedience, or moralistic “trade” (Jn 2:16), but by a broken heart, and moreover, Jesus’s broken and torn body. His own whipping.

Using Jesus’s suffering and death to shed light on the psalms and the prophets, as well as his position against the old Law in his early ministry, it becomes clearer why God has such zeal for all of this. It’s because fidelity to the rules lower our field of vision away from Jesus. Those who believe themselves to be healthy, after all, have no need of a doctor (Mk 2:17). The rules elicit pride and self-reliance more than faith and intimacy. Jesus’ prophetic demonstration in the temple sounds like anger, and in one sense it is because it’s linked with peoples’ sinful actions (the law incites disobedience), but digging deeper, it’s actually a veiled love story. It’s God in the flesh tearing up the thing that keeps his people from him, doing damage to the old way of “bring your sacrifices to God” and replacing it with a new and better way of “God brings his own sacrifice to us.”

A helpful quip to remember in Christian theology: God doesn’t change, but the covenants do. He isn’t aloof, or indecisive, nor does he make mistakes. He knew exactly what he was doing by sending the law first — to show us that our calloused hands aren’t the answer. But Jesus was always his plan A. His grace is the axis around which the entire story rotates. Everything else (even other parts of Scripture) falls subservient to it, and morphs and bends and aches at the whim of it. God has a heart, even a zeal, for this kind of scriptural drama. He puts us, the money-changing self-justifiers, out of a job. He beckons us to find rest in his son alone, the one who was struck on the cheek for our sins. And he invites us to stop the charade of striving to measure up and to be better versions of ourselves. These aren’t quaint lessons. They’re things God went to war over, and who took the bullet, that we might lay down our religious checklists and be spared. 

The post God Doesn’t Change, But The Covenants Do appeared first on Red Tree.

“Dear Evan Hansen” is a coming-of-age story that follows a socially awkward and anxious high school senior who struggles to fit in. Following a tragedy, Evan gets caught in a web of lies which forces him to choose between telling the truth (something he doesn’t do well) or allowing his lies to hurt the people he cares about. If he tells the truth, he’ll be able to stop the damage his lies have inflicted on the family of a recently deceased boy, Connor. If he continues on his path of deceit, he’ll live under the false guise of a hero as he romantically pursues Connor’s sister, Zoe. As the walls of the room start closing in on Evan, his often-distant working and single mother, Heidi, finally catches him red-handed. 

Evan’s Dad left the family when he was just a boy and has been absent ever since. It’s not hard at this point to put the pieces together and realize that Evan’s desire to be known stems back from never being accepted by his father. The focus now turns to Heidi, who explains the day Evan’s dad left through the song “So Big / So Small” by Rachel Bay Jones.

After recounting Evan’s final goodbye before his Dad left in his truck, Heidi readily admits her inability to be the parent she wanted to be. 

And the house felt so big, and I felt so small

The house felt so big, and I—

And I knew there would be moments that I’d miss

And I knew there would be space I couldn’t fill

And I knew I’d come up short a billion different ways

And I did

And I do

And I will

And yet, her steadfast love for her son hasn’t faded. She remembers her son asking her at a later point, “Is there another truck coming to our driveway? A truck that will take Mommy away?”

Even when her son has broken her trust through lies, deceit, and motives of selfish gain for his own comfort, Heidi reminds her son of who she is:

But like that February day

I will take your hand, squeeze it tightly and say

There’s not another truck in the driveway

Your mom isn’t going anywhere

Your mom is staying right here

…

No matter what

I’ll be here

…

When it all feels so big

‘Til it all feels so small

We’ve all become accustomed to a conditional love that says it will stick with us if we continue to behave, check the boxes, or not mess up past a certain point. Brokenness runs deeply in each of our personal and familial histories. It’s easy to feel like the rope of grace we have been given is either too short or too frail, eventually and inevitably snapping, leaving us ousted from the love and commitment we so desperately want and need.

For Evan, it was an actual father who left. For me, it was a broken friendship that left me feeling like a failure. Maybe for you, it was a spouse or significant other who abandoned you when you couldn’t hold up your end of the bargain. Or a friend group that gave you the cold shoulder when your utility ran its course. Whatever it is, we’re all afraid to be “on the outside looking in…” to reference another song from the soundtrack. 

In the story of the prodigal son, in Luke 15, we see the heart of Jesus towards us weak and weary sinners and outcasts. In the story, the son who had once comped his father’s money, spit in his face, and squandered it all on foolish and carnal gains, now returns in desperate hopes to beg for a place to sleep and be fed in his father’s house. He probably felt like his rope of grace had snapped long ago. But what happens next is nothing short of breathtaking:

It says: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.”

It’s hard to put into words just how radical this kind of love is. The directionality of this love, from father to son, could not be overturned by any amount of lies, deceit, and terrible life choices that the wayward son could concoct. Unlike the failed parent who leaves us and forsakes us, God, though he catches us red-handed time and time again as we blunder through this life, sings the song of the cross over us, reminding us that, with him, “There will never be another truck in the driveway. I love you simply because I love you, not based on what you’ve done or not done, but by my own sacrifice. Come inside, the party has already begun. And it will last forever.”

The post No More Trucks in the Driveway appeared first on Red Tree.

Laura turns 40, Chris & Davis head out for sabbatical, and they close out season 2 discussing Elijah reduxes, frolicking like a cow, NT ethics as gospel-drama, and how to teach your left hand to not know what you’re right hand is doing

Red Tree Readings: Malachi 4; Psalm 146; Ephesians 4:17-32
This week’s “BUT WHAT ABOUT” Passage: Matthew 25:31-46 (Sheep & goats)
You can learn more about Red Tree at redtreegrace.com

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

The post E30 How Not to be a GOAT appeared first on Red Tree.

Chris & Laura watch Avatar, Davis reads Dune, and they discuss the possibility of returning to God, how to read the Psalms like a Christian, overturning versus cleansing, and how Jesus is more than a software patch to the Old Testament

Red Tree Readings:
Zechariah 1:1-6; Psalm 68; Ephesians 4:1-16

This week’s “BUT WHAT ABOUT” Passage:
John 2:13-19 (Cleansing the temple)

You can learn more about Red Tree at redtreegrace.com

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

The post E29 Flipping Tables appeared first on Red Tree.

There is a saying that I’ve heard many times in my life: “Your scars become roadmaps for another walking the same path.” The idea that the pain we face is going to serve another meaningful purpose is extremely comforting, especially when you’re knee-deep in what can often feel like senseless or life-altering grief. Grief is never convenient or well-timed. We are taken in often with the shadow of shock still written on our faces.

But there is something to be said about finding comfort in another who has traveled the same road. I think we naturally seek out like-minded pain in those moments because it is often the words that come from the heart of someone who has experienced that particular flavor of grief that brings the most balm to your fresh wound. Then, it becomes a shared pain, a pain that is enveloped in a sense of belonging and understanding.

If this is true on a human level, how much more true is it on a divine level? The love we are able to offer someone becomes richer and deeper when it comes from a place of shared grief. Grief absorbs grief, and that truth cannot be replaced with good intentions, however much we may try. And it is that truth that God stepped into, in the person of Jesus Christ. When we read words of comfort and solace in the Bible, we can be assured that it comes from a fellow traveler, not from someone calling out to us from a high place. In fact, God left his high place, and walked away from his throne, in order to climb into the pits with us, to not only meet our despair and grief but to absorb it. In his short time on this earth, Jesus experienced loss, pain, suffering, despair, betrayal, and finally death. His hands are as muddy as ours as he reaches out to us, finding us in the dark in a way that nothing else can. His brow is sweaty, his body bruised and broken. David sang, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” We are loved by a God who did not give us a moralistic roadmap out of pain and suffering, but instead willingly and joyfully walked into it, knowing that that was the only way we could join him on the other side, whole and wrapped in joy.

Our scars become roadmaps for our loved ones who must travel the same road as us. But in the scars that trace the body of Jesus, even after his resurrection, as his encounter with Thomas shows, we find more than solace and comfort. We find a timeline of our redemption, a roadmap to the only way out from beneath the crushing weight of sin and death. His scars — his own walk through the valley, the psych ward of the cross — tell the story that the entire biblical narrative tells. Isaiah wrote, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” The holes in his hands and feet, the gaping wound in his side, his scarred back and head all are strokes in the divine love letter of the gospel. As we feel our heart break, as we feel our chest collapse and our minds reel, we can be assured that the bloody hands of Christ hold us fast, and that should we open our eyes and look into His, we will find more than a roadmap out of this suffering, but an all-encompassing and unrelenting pursuit of every broken and hurting inch of our being. 

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