The Banquet for the Broken

            I wrote this post on our drive up to the Joni and Friends family retreat in Scott’s Valley at Mission Springs last Sunday but I did not realize that once we arrived at camp, I would not have access to Wifi until we arrived back at the hotel in Thousand Oaks late last night, so anyways here is my post from last week! And this week’s post is on the way!

This first week of my internship has been simply and yet extravagantly blessed. When I first learned about this internship, I was uncertain of this week of textbook learning from a book called Beyond Suffering. I prayed that I would have an open mind and let my heart be prepared for the upcoming weeks of service. I could sum up the week by saying that our God is absolutely and incredibly faithful!! But I want to share more than a sentence about everything that I have learned this week so I hope your looking for more than a summary J

            Through my experiences and through the lectures I heard, I grew in my understanding of the importance of stories. My heart is captivated by the stories of the incredible people who surround me. I’ve heard stories of surrender, healing, conviction, passion, trust, and generosity, all of which originate in brokenness. In Luke 14 the Great Host tells us His servants to go out into the alleys and byways to compel the blind and lame, the outwardly broken, to come to His feast so that His house might be full. Now this took a while to fully register for me so I’m going to say it again: Our God wants His house full of people with disabilities! We need humility to admit our own brokenness before we can come in and help fill our Lord’s house, then also we can go out in love to help gather those who feel ill-equipped and invite them to the great banquet for the broken. “The only fitness God requires is that we feel our need of Him!” Praise be to the One who says it’s ok not to be ok, who invites us to come empty so that we may be filled with His grace and love. The community with disabilities is the largest unreached people group in the world, but the fields are ripe for the harvest and the differences between their struggles and ours are not so different as they once seemed.

 God has given each person a story, but in this fast-paced world we can get too caught up in comparison (which so often turns to pride or self pity) and we forget that when we share our stories, we are less likely to criticize or judge and more likely to trust and understand how to best encourage each other. Our stories are often filled with suffering, maybe because “God is not as interested in removing the problems that we see as He is in removing the selfishness to which we are blind”. Suffering could be described as “a splash-over from hell,” and sometimes God might use suffering to grab our attention or wake us up from complacency. But if hard times are a spoonful of hell, then are easy times a spoonful of heaven? No, rather “it is when we find God in the midst of suffering that we taste the joy of being in the presence of God”. For “the more we lean on our Savior, the stronger we find Him to be!”

Nevertheless, it is hard to reconcile the fact that God is all powerful and yet suffering still exists in the world. Timothy Keller once explained this in his book Reason for God saying that if we believe that we have a God big enough to eradicate the world of suffering then we must also believe that we have a God big enough to have a purpose for suffering bigger than our mortal minds can comprehen. When questioned about why she trusts a God that has allowed her to suffer quadriplegia for 40 years Joni responded that she has faith because Jesus knows the pain of this world. He was paralyzed physically when His hands and feet were nailed to the cross, experienced the relational poverty of misunderstanding, betrayal, and rejection and was a homeless wanderer on this earth. And He calls us to follow Him. We need to realize that “the promise of suffering is found in bold not in the fine print when we sign up to be in the army of the Lord”.

Beyond this, our “God is a Healer” as Mike Hoggatt’s daughter proclaims. She a precious little girl whom he and his wife adopted at age 3; she is a cancer survivor and has been diagnosed with autism. I believe that our God is in the business of healing. But to understand that healing, we must understand that God’s value system is not like the value system of this world. Our value in the eyes of God comes from our Savior. God already loves us infinitely and cannot love us any more or any less than He does at this very second. And since our value is based on what God has done, we come back once again to the idea that God invites us into His presence just as we are, with our stories of brokenness and healing. “Suffering is the textbook for learning our own identity” and for bringing us into a place of community. 1 Thessalonians is a story about perseverance through suffering and remaining steadfast through affliction as Paul encourages the church of the Thessalonians. I want to conclude this post as Paul closes his letter:

            “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely 

and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless

 at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it… 

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you” 

 -1 Thessalonians 5:23-24,28

*Most of the quotes in this post are from when Joni came to speak to us while we were in class at the IDC!