deep God thoughts

...A shoutout to Steve for this one - A deep God thought for you.

Homegroup tonight was amazing. I walked in with a lot of random concepts, and the Holy Spirit somehow pulled everything together. The coolest ideas I walked away with:

1) Jesus gave sight to a blind man (John 9), and the group thought about what he must have experienced when he first saw the world. About how it might be a lot like us trying to imagine a new color - every color we could picture in our heads was something we'd already seen. A new color would require a completely different category in our brains, a new place conceptually....a new plane....and we moved on to think about how following Jesus was like trying to imagine a new color. Totally above our abilities to imagine, requiring total faith, completely different from anything we'd experienced. Jesus gives sight to the blind. Us.

2) That the church today spends so little time repenting. We were trying to figure out how we're supposed to repent...after every sin? At the end of every day? A blanket prayer, or for specifics? I was struck by the thought that if we really, really understood our sin as God does, and could trace its destruction and how it devastates ourselves and God and other people (Five People You'll Meet in Heaven), how somber we would be as we asked for forgiveness. Not just a sidenote in the Sunday reflection prayer before church was dismissed. Maybe Catholics and Episcopals have that idea right, that it is worth taking time every week to dwell on our sin, that we might truly understand grace.

3) Chapter 11 from Chocolat...Serge physically abuses his wife, Josephine, and later asks her for forgiveness, and she accepts his apology. He's stunned as he realizes that this does not mean she will come back to live with him. Is our repentance conditional? Do we ask God for forgiveness, expecting him also to undo the damage our sin has already done in our lives? Do we ask God for forgiveness, when all we really want is for God to put things back to normal?

Yikes. I love you guys. Lacey