Scarred Body and Mind

Today’s message at church was given by Yuka, my friend at a Bible School.
(My husband later told me that he couldn’t associate giving a sermon with such a young and nice looking lady.)

The passage was from Genesis 28: 10-19 where Jacob had a dream of a ladder on which the angels of God descend and ascend.

Yuka started her sermon from how people at church and church itself are scarred from life’s journey.

Jacob in these passages was hurt from the fight with his brother Essau. Jacob was quiet and introverted unlike his brother who was outdoorsy and a hunter. On his journey to Beer-sheba, he was likely physically scarred in the desert where you cannot find a clinic.

In this journey, God showed a ladder. That is, in the original language, more solid than a ladder, more like stairs. The memorial stone piles which Jacob created were meager, but God must have liked it.

A church is like a family. We sometimes feel that our sisters and brothers in faith are closer than our own families. Still, we are often hurt and scarred from the relationship.

God often takes away things He gave to us. Yuka said she wanted to give us her own example but gave up on the idea, because there are too many of those. She also showed us twelve steps after grief by Prof. Alfons Deeken.

That happens on our journey to the promised land. We are led to the promised land, but we often feel that we get lost along the way, and in the course of our journey, we lose things. However, in the same way that our journey could take us all around the earth, we eventually return to the spot where we started our journey in glory; that is the promised land. On the earth, it could be a new identity: the last step after grief.