Seeing Through the Fog

This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series called, “When Life Gets in the Way.” Sometimes when we have gotten in a good groove in our lives, something comes along to completely upset the apple cart. Our plans, our preparations, our entire lives get interrupted, and then we have to figure out what to do next. Over the next six weeks, we are going to be talking about how to handle these times, especially when God seems to be the one behind them. We’ll start today with a glimpse into Abraham’s story and trusting God when that doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. Let’s dig in.

Seeing Through the Fog

Don’t you just hate interruptions? Getting and staying focused is hard. When we finally get there and something comes along to break our concentration, that’s so frustrating. We teach our children not to interrupt, that interrupting is rude. But we live in a world where distractions and interruptions seem to be multiplying all the time. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I am so easily distracted by…well…just about anything that interruptions are really bad for me. Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I can’t focus at all. I’m just really good at focusing really intently for really short amounts of time. And by “really short amounts of time,” I mean that I can focus until something comes along to distract me…squirrel! (And for a quick peak behind the curtain, I think over the course of writing just that one paragraph, I got up about six times to do something else…)

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Today we are continuing our new teaching series, All Signs Point to Jesus. Like we talked about last week, Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is. He does great and wonderful things in our lives and in the world around us in order to help us wrap our minds around the fact that He exists and what He is like. But if we’re not careful, we can focus our attention so much on the things that He does, that we can stop actually seeing Him. In the next sign John relates to us in his Gospel, Jesus invites a man to see through what He can do to who He really is. Through this story He makes the same invitation to us. Let’s look at this together.

Seeing Through the Fog

Do you remember the first time you realized your teachers were real people too? When you are young, teachers feel like these strange creatures who exist and inhabit the world of school, but don’t ever leave. After all, they’re there every time you are. They leave the world of their classroom behind every now and then, but only to accompany you to somewhere else in the maze that is the school building. Or maybe outside to recess. And if you’re young enough, your teacher is always old. She could be barely into her 20s, but she seems old all the same. But then it happens. You see your teacher somewhere other than school doing normal-people things rather than teacher-people things. And it completely blows your mind. It’s like your entire worldview framework gets shattered into a million pieces that will never be put back together again.

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