Spiritual Pathways || Phase 1 | Lesson Six

As a kid, one of our favorite games was Domino Rally, and when I was looking around for this a while back, I realized it's not quite the same quality that it was whenever I was younger, either that or I remember it differently. But I pulled out a piece of the game and you can see it is a just a stretch of plastic that has some dominoes set up on it so that it can be perfectly spaced, one knocked down the next, to the next, to the next. And sometimes this is what is going on in my brain when I think about choices that I make in a day, how one choice can lead to another, to another, to another, to another. And sometimes we can get really overwhelmed if we've made a series of choices that maybe weren't the best, maybe weren't the most helpful or healthy or wise. But an article I read a while back reminded me that in the course of one day, we make 35,000 choices, 35,000 choices in one day. And about 267 of those choices are related to food alone. Am I going to put my sandwich on bread? Am I going to add salt? Am I going to have seconds? Am I going to have water or tea? We are always making choices throughout the day. Most of the time, subconsciously, we don't realize all the choices that we're making along the way. Even you could be walking along and see a piece of trash and we make the decision, are we going to bend over and pick that up and toss it in the can or are we going to walk by it? But we aren't actively thinking about how many choices we make in a day. But in the course of a day, those 35,000 choices, while we may get hung up on one that wasn't the best or one that set something else in motion, like this game would show you, we can also look at it from the opposite perspective that, yeah, that one choice was made, but I have another one coming. That in the course of a day, we make 35,000 choices. Maybe this one wasn't so great, but I can do the next right thing. I can do the next best choice. I can start again in my next crossroads of decision making. And so as you continue through this series asking questions, does God love me? Does God really have a plan? All of those trending questions that come to our mind, you can stop and remember that we make 35,000 choices in a day and you always have an opportunity coming for you to make your next best choice. And what feels like the next natural progression of the questions that we've been asking is, is God real? Does he love me? Does he have a plan? Because if those three questions are yes, then there's another ones that seems to pop up right after that. It causes usually a lot of wrestle when it comes to walking with God or expressing or engaging in faith. Is it why is there evil and suffering in this world? If God is real and God loves me

and God has a plan, then why is there evil and suffering in this world? And I can say for me that the evil and suffering that I've been through in my life really all fit into like one of three categories. The evil and suffering in my life that I've experienced kind of all fit into one of three categories. The first one is I'm an idiot. The second one is you're an idiot. And the third one is we have an enemy. There have been things that have happened in my life, suffering and hard times and bad things that have happened simply because I am a fallen person who makes mistakes. One of the big things that I've had to walk through in my recovery is giving myself grace and I'm just a human being that I'm not capable of perfection. Perfection is not demanded of me that I can rest in the fact that Christ has forever paid the debt and settled that that scale that I was never going to be able to fail, that I was never going to be able to balance or I was never going to be able to love to. I'm just a human being that I have limits. And that's exactly how God made me. But there's been suffering and hard things in my life simply because I'm an idiot, because I do dumb things. There have been hard things happen in my life because other people are idiots. Other people have done things. Other people have made choices. And when they made their choices, those choices impacted me. Like when they made one of their decisions and it flipped a domino, then that impacted me. So evil and hard things, suffering has happened in my life because other people are not perfect and other people make bad decisions and mistakes. The third thing that happens in the third category is, man, we just, we have an enemy. We have an enemy that in Genesis, when he decided that he didn't want to follow God's plan anymore, He was tired of God getting all the glory and all the hype, and he wanted in on that, and he led a rebellion to go away from God. Like, his sole purpose from now on is to cause as much damage and destroy and to hurt as much as he can, as much as he possibly can, everything that God loves. In John 10, 10, it says that the thief comes only to steal, to kill, and destroy. Please lock onto that.

The temptation gets dressed up, that, what do we call it, that euphoric recall that when I'm struggling in this healing journey that I'm on in recovery, and it feels like I'm not sure what to do next, and I'm not sure how to handle this, and there's all this stuff coming at me at once, and there's this mindset that this, the instant relief that would come if I could just put one in me, and we lose sight of, I was listening to Joe and Charlie, and Joe and Charlie said, I forget. I start thinking about what alcohol is gonna do for me, and I forget what alcohol does to me. So man, if you're in that spot, and you're thinking like, man, this is hard, and I'm not sure I can do this anymore, don't think just about what whatever your drug is could do for you. Think of what that's going to do to you. Because if you're like me, a little bit was never it. A switch flips, and it takes outside intervention or some dramatic thing to happen to shut it off. And if God is real, and he loves me, and he has a plan, why is there evil and suffering in this world? It's because I do things that I shouldn't do, and you do things that you shouldn't do, and those things impact each other, and we have an enemy. But how beautiful is it, the rest of John 10, 10,

it says, the beginning is the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy, but Jesus, who was saying this, says, but I have come that they may have life, and they may have it to the fullest. If I'd have known that I could feel this good, even through ups and downs, even through hard, if I'd have known that I could be at peace, if I'd have known that I could feel this good, I would have got sober a long time ago. I have come that they may have life, and have it to the fullest. On the other side of this battle that you're in right now, of healing, don't lose sight of what the drug may do for you, but also what it's going to do to you, and don't miss that God has sent Jesus, and that we, so that we can live life, and life to the fullest. In this section of our phase one sessions, we're unpacking some real questions that are often very common that we hear, that we've even asked ourselves, and specifically in this session, we have talked about why is there evil in suffering? If God is loving and good, why are these bad things happening? And we've heard about consequences because of choices I've made myself, consequences because of choices others have made, and then the simple fact that there's an enemy

prowling like a roaring lion, looking to steal, kill, and destroy anything that's good. And to help illustrate this, we wanted to introduce you to a Japanese art form called Kintsugi. And the point of this Japanese art form is to take old, typically broken, sometimes even almost shattered pieces, and put them back together with a gold lacquer. And the beauty of this is that once those pieces are put back together, because of that gold lacquer, filling in those cracks and holding it all together, the piece ends up more valuable than when it began. And so in a very basic sense, what that would look like is you'd start with a plate, let's say, just a plate, a blank, plain white plate. And if you would throw it down, and it would break into all of these different pieces, to just the regular human eye, we'd think, oh, that's worthless, it's broken, it's trash. And sometimes when the plates of our lives get thrown down and broken, those are the messages that we can take on to ourself, that we are worthless, that we are broken, that we aren't gonna be able to be used for anything, and so we may as well pitch it. But what this Japanese art of Kintsugi teaches you is that when you take the time to put the pieces back together and not hide the cracks, but highlight them with the gold lacquer,

you see the finished product that is more valuable and able to use those broken pieces to pull it all together in a way that the original work wouldn't have. So when we think about our lives, and we can often think that we're striving for this, that a life with no hiccups, no bumps, no bruises, but at the end of the day, we live in a fallen world and there are things that are out of our control. But instead of letting shame drive us deeper into a pit, we can allow the Lord to use that gold unifying lacquer that only he can use because of his restoring and redemptive plan to be able to make something better and stronger than what we even began with to start.