Encountering God’s Love in Suffering & SicknessSample

“God’s love allows us to let go”

Our struggle in marriage is holding so tightly to the other and forgetting the picture is the living allegory. At the tender age of forty-two, Jason has been asked to open wide his hands to the picture of Jesus in the marriage he has enjoyed for sixteen years. He had to stand before our church community and confess that he wants the morsel, the shadow, the picture, and the letting go is breaking him in a way he isn’t prepared for. He cried through the text of Mark 12, he broke, and he shared from an honest heart. He shared how he struggles with belief, and asked for help in his unbelief through this journey. His words were a bruised grace, the honest grappling with truth we all want to avoid. Many pastors would have skipped the passage altogether and simply let the hard verses sit alone without any teaching, saved for another day. But Jason went through the hard passage, his own clinging, his own desperate fears of our story changing, and pointed to the goodness of God in providing such a picture of grace through our marriage. He stood bravely before our community. He stood balk, with his fists tight, asking for prayers in the letting go. He asked us all what shadows we were holding on to.

* What things in your life are you clinging to as shadows instead of remembering the light in your story?