In life, we walk on this tightrope between overwhelming pain on the one hand and too much comfort on the other. During the last five weeks of this course, we’ve all shared times where the pain in our lives was so extreme, we felt like God had forgotten us.   To read some of your blog posts has been harrowing. As I read some of them, I couldn’t help saying, “How on earth did this person survive?” It was just too much.   Most of us can’t live in places of throbbing pain like that. We need some level of comfort. We need someone hugging us and giving us a...

During the last nine weeks of this course, we’ve visited seasons of soul-crushing pain. We’ve asked God to help us learn from that pain. And we’ve walked out of those seasons stronger for it. We’ve considered how God may have equipped us to transform that pain and to use it for ministry. The challenge before us now is to live in freedom. How do we know if we are really free? And how should we think about pain going forward? Paul fought to help the brothers who lived in Galatia to stay free after others sought to pull them back into the bondage of religious,...

As we talk about brokenness and getting through it, I remember back to just about a year and a half ago, when my daughter launched for her World Race. Everyone was talking about brokenness, and how necessary it was.  How it was “part of the process”.  I remember sitting in session after session of the parent launch, hearing about all this brokenness and wondering to myself….what are they talking about?   How can brokenness be a good and necessary thing?  In my mind, I always thought brokenness was a bad thing…we must be strong and never...

Spend some time reflecting back over these past several weeks.  Spend time in prayer and listening to what God is saying. You comments today should be what you have learned over this course.   What have you learned about pain? What have you learned about yourself? What have you learned about where God is in our pain?    

There is this provocative passage in the gospel of Luke where in one version* Jesus, talking to his disciples about John the Baptist says, “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and violent men take it by force.” (Matt: 11:12) To which I say – what does that mean? I can relate to violence striking at those in my sphere of influence. Whether it’s just random stuff happening, or whether it’s really people within the kingdom of God who are being targeted in a particular way, people I know are suffering violence. To be human is to encounter pain. We...

At this point in the course, we’re going to move from processing our own personal pain, to understanding from a broader perspective why pain exists. So we’ve inventoried our own pain, we’ve grieved and processed it. And now we’re looking at ourselves as a subset of humanity whose condition looks and feels like our own. People the world over are often in terrible pain.   If you talk to people about the reasons that they doubt there is a good God who cares for them, one of the first things you’re likely to hear is “Why would a good God allow so much...