Beauty for ashes

"All he wanted to do was tell people about the same Gospel that changed his own life"

I listened to this phrase today in church, as the pastor described Peter, and it moved me to tears. I know. Kind've a random phrase to move you to tears, especially given that I've heard it seven hundred and forty one times within this context and others. So many pulpits, repeated so many times.
 "The Gospel changes" Woohoo! we say.
 "Spread the Gospel" Yes! we reply.
 "New life in Christ" Hallelujah praise God! we echo.

Replay, replay, over and over, so much so that I have been missing the power behind those words for most of my life.


I sat with a friend this Friday and hurt with her. She wouldn't have called it that, but that's what it was. Her car has been breaking down on her, to follow the pattern that she feels much of her life has. She was talking to her mom, who divorced her dad long ago, and is truly a miserable woman that spends the majority of her relationship with her daughter alternately manipulating her, bribing her, playing her off her dad, and guilting her. Her mom was telling her what a miserable daughter she was, and asking her to see if she could get money our of her dad to fix the car, and all around enforcing the idea that her daughter's best was just not good enough. I left my genetics homework sitting at my desk and went to sit with her as she talked with her mom, partially to let her know I supported her, partially because I didn't want her to start yelling curse words at her mom like last time, and partially because I was about to tell her mom to stick it up her ass and stop being a spoiled, self centered child if her berating fest continued.

95% of the things I think never get past my mouth, which is good, and would be appreciated more if people actually knew what I wanted to say to them. Sheesh.


As I sat later and processed the train wreck of a relationship I just witnessed, I reflected on just how much hurt there actually is in the world. Sometimes I think that satan has less to do with our miserable lives being miserable than we think-our sin nature takes care of most damage infliction. We consider the hurting of the world to be all the people whose monetary and material possessions don't match the status of our own. We think of people who live without clean water and enough food and our hearts ache and we are moved to help.
And we should be. But then there's more.
I also think of all the girls who are growing up without dads, or with pathetic excuses for fathers. Who deeply question their place in their father's heart, and who truthfully believe that their worth lies in what they have to offer other people-worth is in how much they can be used. And I think of all the boys growing up who are told that being a man means being cruel and insensitive, and exercising force to gain respect. Who have come to believe that the material and physical is really all there is, and futility is all we have to try to grasp.

And I thought about how all anyone ever really wants is rarely what anyone directly seeks. How we look in all the wrong places that lead us down so many different paths that take so much from us and never give back. And I wondered how much the heart of God aches to see His own children running around chasing after everything except the one thing that matters. Who desire everything but the one thing they were created to desire-His glory. Who, if they only learned to see Jesus and see true life, would never want to taste of their own self-centeredness again.


I understand a little better, what it means that the Gospel transforms. How impactful it is that God, through Jesus, has actually made a way that our hearts; degenerate, lost, broken, without hope; can be redeemed. Can be changed, in a way that only the Gospel has the power to do. Truth crashes into the lies we believe and tears them up, like only truth can do. Light shines into the dark places you keep for yourself, and it kills the darkness. Obliterates the falsehood. And only the Gospel of Jesus-that He took the penalty that I should have had to pay and He paid it Himself so that I could experience true life with Him-only the Gospel of Jesus can bring about that change.


There is so much broken in this world. So much hurt that never should have happened. And there is so much hope in understanding that God has provided for it. He provided before we needed it. And that provision and hope is made possible because the Gospel changes lives, and changes hearts, and redeems.


And so a little bit more, I begin to see the power behind the phrase that we throw around like a paper airplane, not much caring where it lands because it has little weight to us.


We understand so little