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
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
Category: General
Tags: Abuse, Advent, God With Us, healing, Incarnation, Mennonerds, The Femonite, The Jesus Event, Tyler Tully
Related Reading
Forgiving (and Loving!) Your Only Son’s Killer
StoryCorps is an organization whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of their lives. We came across this extraordinary story on The Daily Beast and had to share it. Mary Johnson’s only son, 20 year old Laramiun Byrd, was murdered during a…
How NOT To Be Christ-Centered: A Review of God With Us – Part IV
In the first three parts of this review of Scott Oliphint’s God with Us we’ve outline his attempt to reframe all God’s accommodations in Scripture in light of the Chalecedonian Creed. He, in essence, uses the mysterious union of God and humanity in Christ to justify asserting that the immutable God can really become mutable…
Living Incarnationally
The Christian faith is centered on the belief that in Jesus Christ God became a human being. This is commonly referred to as the doctrine of the incarnation. It means that in Jesus, God became embodied. God left the blessed domain of heaven, was born in Bethlehem, and took on our humanity that we might…
Was Jesus Violent in the Temple?
Many adopt the attitude depicted in the picture above, saying that Jesus used violence when he cleansed the temple. But Jesus’ stance on nonviolence is clear not only from how he responded to threatening enemies at the end of his life; it’s also strongly emphasized his teachings. We need to understand what Jesus was up…
The Greatest Mystery of the Christian Faith
God has always been willing to stoop to accommodate the fallen state of his covenant people in order to remain in a transforming relationship with them and in order to continue to further his sovereign purposes through them. Out of love for humankind, Scripture tells us, Jesus emptied himself of his divine prerogatives, set aside…
How NOT To Be Christ-Centered: A Review of God With Us – Part I
Theologians throughout Church history have used the concept of divine accommodation to account for everything in Scripture that seemed “unworthy” of God. Whatever didn’t line up with what we know about God was seen as God accommodating his revelation to our limited and fallen framework. The trouble is, theologians have, by and large, used the…