We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

In Search of Healing During Advent

The First Sunday of Advent

Tyler Tully was a guest-poster on The Femonite today. He generally blogs at The Jesus Event and is a contributor to the Mennonerds network. His guest post deals with the flashbacks of a childhood filled with abuse that are triggered when he hears the cries of his five month old babies. The season of Advent is a season of waiting and darkness in the church calendar, and although it brings with it the coming of Christ, it is a season that welcomes our sorrow and pain. It calls us to keep each other company in the darkness as we wait. If you’re a person who struggles as Christmas approaches, we hope this post will call you to be present to the God who grieves with us and heals our wounds.

From Tyler’s piece:

Still, there is an expected healing of hope in the Seasonal air. The Incarnation reminds me, that although I enter into counseling one month before Christmas Eve, I do not bear this burden alone. Together we journey with Jesus in a place of vulnerability towards community. As a family, we either heal together or we enable the stinging pain of abuse to linger. But even when healing occurs, sometimes scars remain. And although I know that the scars I bear come part and parcel with being human, I worship the Incarnate God who resurrected triumphantly with scars of His own.

Image by  Susanne Nilsson via Compfight

Related Reading

How NOT to be Christ-Centered: A Review of God With Us – Part III

In the previous two posts on Oliphint’s God With Us, we’ve seen that Oliphint is trying to reframe divine accommodations in a Christ-centered way, but that what he means by this is not that he is going to derive his understanding of God from Christ, but that he is going to use the “hypostatic union”…

Why Did God Heal or Not?

In 1996 a 27-year-old man in my church named David was diagnosed with an inoperable brain cancer. The doctors decided to send David to the Mayo Clinic to receive some experimental treatments on the slim hope these might at least prolong his life. The night before David left, I and a dozen other people went…

The Longing of Advent

The Advent season is a time of anticipating the coming of God, in Christ, a time of turning our imagination toward the revelation of God’s love for us. This after all is the deepest longing of our heart, and our natural longings always point us to something real. We grow hungry only because there’s such…

Lighten Up: Osheta the Narniac

You may not be aware of this, but Greg is a MennoNerd. What is a MennoNerd, you ask? According to their website, “MennoNerds is a network of Anabaptist bloggers, tweeps, Facebookers, and Google plussians (just made that word up) from around the Internet.” They recently started a series of fun video blog conversations and they’ve been…

God Made Visible

During Advent, we celebrate and bring to the forefront of our imagination the God who was made visible. The Gospel of John sums up the advent of God with one sentence: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full…

Close Encounters of the Third (Kingdom) Kind: A Reflection on the Missio Alliance Conference

What an incredible gathering we had last week! It was invigorating, informative and fun! What stands out most to me was the family-feel of the conference. Like most of you, I have usually felt a bit alien when attending Christian conferences throughout the years. Not this one. You could sense the shared kingdom ethos in…