Distortions
Hey South Creek Family,
This past Sunday we continued our series Distortions: Naming the Things That Keep People From the Real Jesus, and this week we named one of the most common ones: Nobody cares about my pain.
Here's the truth underneath it: at our core, everyone wants to be seen, heard, and cared for. When we're not, it doesn't just wound us, it distorts how we see God. He becomes distant, mean, or not real. We talked about how, good or bad, people's experiences will often inform their outlook more than information. When someone has been let down, abandoned, or rejected by people, it can feel like they've been let down, abandoned, or rejected by God. And when it's Christians who didn't show up, that distortion only compounds.
We looked at John 11, where Jesus deliberately waits two days after hearing his friend Lazarus is sick. When he arrives, Martha and then Mary each say the same thing to him:
"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."
Jesus doesn't correct them or defend himself. He already knows he's about to raise Lazarus, and still, the shortest verse in the Bible says it all:
"Jesus wept."
Those tears aren't weakness. They're what his care looks like. This is the same God Hagar called "the God who sees me," and the same Jesus who cried out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He doesn't stand at a distance from our pain. He enters it.
So what do we do with our own pain? We talked about three simple steps: name it, reframe it, and reclaim it. Your feelings are always valid, but they're not always true, and reframing isn't rewriting what happened. It's refusing to let what happened write the story of who God is. Then we invite God to reclaim it, trusting him to use even our sorrows for good so that we can be the comfort to someone else that we've received.
We closed with the story of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" in the middle of a national war and his own devastating loss. His poem admits real despair, and then answers it not with an explanation, but with who God is: not dead, not asleep, and not done.
That answer doesn't stay in the room. Whether you're carrying a wound from someone who didn't show up for you, or you realize you may have been that person for someone else, the real Jesus is still here, still weeping with us, and still not done.
-Pastor Aaron Perry