Zach went through that this year with his dad when he was on a ventilator. By God’s grace he ended up being part of the 5%, but the hours and days of not knowing, oscillating between hope and beginning to grieve a death that hadn’t yet occurred were brutal. We got the call this past year that my father-in-law went into cardiac arrest, a situation with a 5% survival rate. Zach, a member here, lost his dad to it this year.Īnd that part of watching it happen, knowing someone is near death, can sometimes be just as hard, if not harder, than grieving the death. And of course, COVID-19 has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives unexpectedly over the past 2 years. Chadwick Boseman, the Black Panther, died of colon cancer last year at the age of 43. Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter accident last year at the age of 41. But at some point our weaknesses and limitations confront even the wealthiest and most powerful among us. The wealthy and titled seem to have so much, and in a sense of course they do. This man was an official, so he was probably well off, and yet even to him, this scariest of situations happened. One of the scariest thoughts a parent can think is the thought that their child may die. This official had apparently either heard of or had himself seen some of Jesus’ signs, so he goes to Cana to ask Jesus to come to Capernaum and heal his son, for his son was near death. But at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. So He comes then to Cana in Galilee, and John even reminds us of that first sign, where Jesus had turned water into wine there at a wedding. It’s not entirely clear how that proverb relates to Jesus’ travel plans, but it probably means that Jesus chose to go to the surrounding region of Galilee rather than his hometown of Nazareth, which was in Galilee, as a kind of judgment on Nazareth’s unbelief. How do you do that? Bring Him your wants, trust His Word, and then get beyond your wants.Īfter Jesus’ time in Samaria he departed for Galilee, and the reason given is that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown. How’s that happen? How do we get from the very real visible, sensible problems in our lives, that really do matter not only to us, but to Jesus, how do we get from them to faith in Jesus? We must follow the signs to Jesus. But by the end, he and his whole household believed in Jesus. The main character in this passage besides Jesus was an official who had a visible, sensible problem, and at the beginning of the passage, he was fixated on it. And we too can get so fixated on things in our lives that are visible, sensible problems, that we lose sight of Jesus. The danger was that people get too fixated on them, and so stop with them, instead of seeing through them to Jesus. At this point in the Gospel of John, Jesus has done a lot of visibly impressive things, what He calls in this passage “signs and wonders.” That’s cool, right? Those things helped people believe in Him, but they also came with a danger. With many things in life, we get fixated on what we can see and lose sight of what is ultimate. Why? Because they realize it’s possible to get overly fixated on the number on the scale, and miss the point of a healthy diet and exercise: To be healthy. Nonetheless, there are some diets that prohibit you from weighing yourself. It’s a nice visible, measurable way to see if what you’re doing is working. And any time you’re trying to lose weight, it seems reasonable to weigh yourself occasionally. I’m currently trying to drop a few pounds before the holidays I gained what Alyson Fox, a member here, told me was called the “COVID 19” over the past year.
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