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Kelly Flanagan: God is with us in the grit of life

by Mike Vandermause on December 04, 2018

Most of us as humans have parts of our lives we want to give back, GBCC guest speaker Kelly Flanagan said during his message on Sunday, December 3.

We would like to take a receipt and return the painful parts of our lives, such as loneliness, shame, a feeling of not being good enough, a marriage that isn’t working, uncertainty or confusion.

Kelly examined the shortest verse in the Bible — Jesus wept (John 11:35) — to show that Jesus gave us a different model. Here are some points from Kelly’s message:

*Jesus didn’t skip over the painful parts of life. Jesus cried over the death of Lazarus. He took his time to experience the pain and feel the grief, even though he eventually raised Lazarus from the dead. Jesus was not quick to pass over the painful parts of life. He made a space for the grit of the human story.

*Even in the midst of difficult circumstances, Jesus gave people of faith permission to experience pain. Faith in the future doesn’t erase our pain about the present. Just because you are going through doubt or uncertainty about a tough situation doesn’t mean you don’t have faith. It means you are paying attention to being human and it’s OK to experience that.

*In the story of Jesus’ birth and life we see examples of people of faith experiencing the grittiness of life. Mary was a pregnant teenage girl. Joseph was pledged to be married to a woman who became pregnant. Jesus was born in a dirty stable and placed in an unclean feeding trough. Mary and Joseph were forced to leave their homeland, fleeing from murderers and assassins. Jesus was rebuked and rejected by the high and mighty in Jewish religious society. Yet despite the adversity they came through stronger on the other side.

*The mother of two of Jesus’ disciples asked that they get to sit at the right hand of Jesus — she wanted them to skip the grit of suffering and go directly to the glory. But Jesus said it doesn’t work that way. You must go through the grit as Jesus did — he suffered and died before being resurrected and ascending to heaven.

*Jesus showed that life involves grit from beginning to end. His experience of being human is anything but being perfect. Even though he was perfect, it didn’t excuse him from the pain of being human.

*The grit of life is part of the gift of finding your way. Pain may not have a purpose but it might be the one thing that can give us purpose through redemption. Pain never feels promising — it can wreck a day, a year, or a life. We can’t sugar-coat pain, but we can redeem it.

*We resist, avoid and ignore pain or allow it to plunge us into a path of despair. Although pain causes messes, misfortune and disorder, we don’t need to change our relationship to God because of it. Rather, we need to change our relationship to grit and pain. We need to make space for hard stuff. Eventually, grit gives way to the gift.

*Painfulness always precedes peacefulness. There is power in knowing you can overcome pain and grit. Once you know you can overcome it, you can quit scanning the horizon for the next trial. You can stop worrying about the next difficulty because you know God will bring you through it.

*Emmanuel is a name for God we use around Christmas time. Too often as humans we would prefer that the meaning of “Emmanuel” would be ‘God fix us.' Instead, “Emmanuel” means ‘God with us.’ We have a God who has experienced pain and suffering himself and abides with us through our pain.