Faithbase

Hey, you with the frown. Don't turn it upside down. It's fine. What's the shortest verse in the Bible? Do you know? No, either way. It's John 11 35 and it's Jesus swept and what I love about that verse is it reflects a raw and real emotion of the human person of Jesus at the passing of his good friend Lazarus. See, Jesus is on his way to this town when he knows his friend is sick and people are asking him to come and hurry up so that he might heal him. But Jesus still has work to do in this other region and he ends up missing out on his friend and his friend dies. And so what's fascinating about this story is if you're a person who believes that Jesus is a hundred percent human and a hundred percent God, especially in the Gospel of John, you know well ahead of time that Jesus is already knowing what he's gonna do and Jesus knew full well that he was gonna heal Lazarus and eventually bring him back. However, he still took the time to walk through the human emotion process of being sad, of grieving, of being frustrated, and the idea of loss. And what I think is super frustrating in our culture today is like so many times when I see particularly like Instagram, encouragement, Monday motivation, posts, things of that scenario, everything tells us to like hustle, move forward, grind harder, you know, be grateful all the time, don't sit, don't be sad, don't waste time, whatever. And like sometimes you just need to sit and stop and be disappointed. If you have something that doesn't work out, if you have, you know, this understanding something fails, if you put a lot of effort and energy into something, when it doesn't work, when things don't come to fruition, that can really suck. And that's okay to be sad. You see last week we touched on this idea of recognizing that it's good to go through grieving processes and it's good to go through these emotional steps. And in a couple weeks before that, we talked about the idea of what it looks like to really face those challenges and be sincere with them. And we've been kind of lingering in this topic for a while because I think it's super important to recognize that there is so much value in recognizing when you're not okay. Your emotions are natural. They happen. Everyone has them. They're neither good nor bad, but they exist. And because they exist within us, they need to be validated. And one of the things that we do poorly in the church as a whole is anytime we talk with people, we feel like that there's this inherent need to put on like our happy face or our best foot forward all the time. And one thing I think is really interesting, particularly during greeting times, if I'm talking to someone, I'm saying like, hey, how you doing? And they just go terrible. I often like don't know what to say or do in response to that because I'm so programmed to always both say good, like I'm doing well or things are great, and expect that in return from someone that when someone is like uniquely honest with me in these five minutes of greeting time, it really catches me off guard. And I think that's a huge indicator of where we are as a church, capital C, as a whole, that we don't do the best job of creating space and time for people to actually talk and get deep and really explore their emotional connection. And what I think is most interesting about Jesus's encounter with Lazarus is that Jesus knew that everything was going to be okay in the end for him, right? Jesus knew that he was going to raise him from the dead. Jesus knew that Lazarus was going to come back and have a long life, etc. But he still took the time to mourn, to be sad, to walk through that grieving process. How much more so for people like us who don't know that if things are going to be okay in this end? We know that eventually all things will be reconciled, you know, but things might not always be okay this side of the grave. So if Jesus was willing to walk through those emotional processes, then we need to be doing that as well. Again, if you ever need to talk to someone or if you have more questions about this, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram. I'm Joshua underscore Carmen. I would love to connect with you there. Thanks so much and have a great week.