Adults often nudge children to embrace new experiences because they want their little ones to learn to embrace life as an adventure and grow in the confidence that they are surrounded by people who love them. Strangely, as adults, we tend to depend more on ourselves, telling ourselves that our past experience is our best teacher. But because humans tend to remember unpleasant experiences, we avoid all kinds of new situations even when there is a real chance that we may experience something good. We take pride in doing things the same way we have always done even when deep inside, we are yearning for a change in our lives.

 HEALTH is not a one-dimensional attribute. Although our body and physical health are more visible than other aspects of our lives, our mental health, emotional health, relational health and spiritual health are equally important.  

In John 5:1-5, we saw an unusual conversation Jesus had with one out of several disabled persons who often went to a ‘healing pool’ in Bethesda to just lie out. Jesus was visiting Jerusalem for a Jewish festival, and He felt it important to stop by the Bethesda pool. According to folklore, anyone who got into the pool when it was stirred got healed. In fact, it was a popular hangout for persons with disability; ‘the blind, the lame, the paralyzed’ often made their way there, just to get closer to a place that offered hope. Although Bethesda was architecturally beautiful with impressive colonnades, it was not a place that smelled nice because most of the disabled lacked the help they needed to maintain proper hygiene.

People today are obsessed with finding the best fit for everything in life. Whether they are considering jobs, friends, church, sports, volunteering activities, or anything that requires commitment, something fits well when it allows them to enjoy existing pleasures with minimal change and inconveniences. We want options where all outcomes between the x-axis and y-axis are predictable with as little surprise as possible. Even our spiritual journey resembles spurts of occasional events like a short sprint of discipleship, a shot put to reach a given prayer goal, a single marathon of mission fieldwork before we stop and return to activities that best fit our own goals.

This week, Lunar New Year is celebrated by many communities all over the world. Common Lunar New Year rituals that are de rigeur and observed by all adherents include the family reunion dinner, donning new clothes, serving tea to parents and elders, and exchanging of auspicious wishes that make conversations atypical! Indeed, it’s not every day that you hear greetings like, “May your life be smooth with energy and vigor, and may you have a life that is full. Happy New Year!” It highlights the strong oral traditions of the communities, emphasizing teaching and traditions passed on from generation to generation. Indeed, Lunar New Year practices are almost sacred! Sociologists assert that recurrent annual celebrations like the Lunar New Year strengthen the solidarity and the collective conscience of all adherents. In the same way, the Bible also emphasizes the importance of passing on biblical teachings and a godly way of life from generation to generation, from our families to people God has placed in our lives. It is the substance of legacy-making in our own lives, the essence of fellowship with other believers, and the impact we make in society. On an everyday basis, many things that we do so naturally are in fact value-laden family traditions passed down to us. Even simple acts like saying thank you to the postman or delivery personnel, the way we dress at home, celebrating birthdays, having family meals, greeting elders who are present and good work ethics are normative practices that we have been taught since young.

In many ways, memories help us connect effortlessly with the past, but no matter how grateful we are for them, or how much comfort they bring us, they live only in the past. We all know that it takes more than remembering something to keep it going. This is true not only for human relationships but also for our relationship with God: we certainly need to go beyond the memories of our past experiences of His goodness and His miracles. In all seasons of life, we need to continually experience God not so we could build an impressive spiritual archive but so that we could be strengthened in our core as believers. Commonly, we turn to God only when we face setbacks. But as soon as normalcy returns, we let the hustle of everyday life take over and set the relationship on a ‘cruise mode’ till the next mishap. As a result, our connection with God looks more like a seasonal curve with peaks of miracles and dips of complacency and very little else in between.

In Dr. Bob Moorehead’s ‘Paradox of Our Time’+, the former pastor wrote: “We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life; we’ve added years to life, not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We’ve conquered outer space, but not inner space; we’ve done larger things, but not better.”

Further, he added, “These are days of two incomes, but more divorces; these are times of fancier houses, but broken homes….more acquaintances, but fewer friends; more effort, but less success. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication.”

Our need for food, water and shelter is important for health and survival. Yet, people express their class and cultural differences in what they put on the table to eat, where they live and how they keep themselves and their properties safe. What this means is that survival means different things to different people: an impoverished family may be doing all they can to simply scrape by while a middle-class family commits all its resources to keeping up with the Joneses they see on social media, leaving little left for anything else.

Whether facing dire financial situations or living with material comforts, God has the same word for all of us: “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:27,34).

Take a look at your smartphone and the number of applications you have downloaded. Studies have shown that an average person uses about ten mobile apps a day1 and the trend is set to continue through 2022 and beyond. This is because people are constantly looking for something in life, whether it’s for convenience, connections, entertainment, consuming or creating some kind of content on social media.

In the kingdom of apps, there is an app for every kind of service supplied by different resource owners. We can swipe left, right, up and down to search for anything we want: anything except God. In the Kingdom of God, He alone is the resource owner who owns and controls everything and makes it accessible to those who earnestly seek Him.

Whether we like it or not, we are going to have another Christmas while the world tackles the emergence of another COVID-19 variant that is spreading fast with effects still unknown to scientists. This pandemic chaos, however, does not change the crux of the Christmas message.  In fact, the pandemic climate has given all believers and followers of Jesus Christ an undeniable mandate to bring the core message of Christmas closer to the people in our lives.

Gifting is a relational ritual many of us observe for birthdays, anniversaries, or Christmas. Since the start of Covid-19, many people have also been sending each other gifts of food for no other reason than to brighten someone’s day. The giving of gifts between family and friends differentiates itself from donations and transactional exchanges in that it operates within the context of an existing relationship where the giver and the recipient are known to each other. At the same time, it is also a social exchange where the reciprocity that is engendered serves to strengthen the interpersonal connection between the giver and the receiver, even as the ritual is repeated for different reasons. Having said that, not all of us like the hassle of gifting nor do we understand the relational nuances embedded in it, but if we stop treating it as a needless exchange and see it as a manner of human connection, we will all become better gifters and receivers.

We tend to think that it is hard for people to let go of the recognition, fame, and success that they have worked hard to achieve in their lives but for those who have experienced severe trials or extended hardships, it can be equally hard to let go of the victim mentality and the trauma associated with such experiences.

Scripture tells us that the Apostle Paul was a man with a checkered past. The Bible first introduced him to readers in the book of Acts 9:1 when he was still called Saul, a man who was breathing out murderous threats against all followers of Jesus Christ. But we soon saw that God intercepted his heinous mission and singled him out to reach both the Gentiles and the Jews (v15). That radically change his life course but it would also involve his suffering for Christ (v16).

When people find themselves in the company of like-minded people, they let down all artificial guards that keep them from sharing openly with one another. At BeInReach’s first Thanksgiving Celebration, people spoke with vulnerability without any superficial veneers of propriety to recount God’s goodness and love in their lives. Stories flowed from hearts to the homes of everyone online. Even the few who did not have the chance to share had mental or written scripts ready.

This is what gratitude does: it unlocks the fullness of life in our hearts. To quote Melody Beattie, gratitude “turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal to a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.”

IF GOD WERE TO TELL YOU that He wants to take you to a new mountaintop experience with Him, you’d need very little persuasion to join Him for the adventure. But if He were to lay out the possibilities of fatigue, dehydration, altitude sickness, if he were to talk about the reality of natural hazards and adverse weather conditions, if He were to warn you about bugs and mosquitoes, your susceptibility to blisters, injuries and skin irritation, and not to mention the load of supplies you have to carry, the intensive training before the trek, or how the trek will test and expose your deepest anxieties and fears, would you still sign up?

Tourists and children are generally a curious lot. We indulge their curiosity and even exploit it in the form of destinations and adventures for tourists, and games, toys, and themed playgrounds for children. We indulge their curiosity and questions about the most ordinary things. On the other hand, we expect people who have been around or lived a little longer – like locals and adults – to act differently because they should know better.

Remember the last time you traveled to a different place and found yourself a little lost at a renowned landmark? You looked around in the hope of finding some people who might appear like locals – people who speak the local vernacular and have a certain style of dressing. But when you approached them for directions, they appeared equally clueless; some even a little impatient with you.

SURRENDERED. TRANSFORMED. FAITH. These are abstract concepts that are often interpreted in a number of ways. However, when the apostle Paul spoke about the surrendered life in Galatians 2:20 (NIVUK), he was not teaching a philosophy or a way of thinking; he was referring to a truism from his own life experiences with God: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me’.

Today, Christians have a million reasons to be busy. Whether we are starting a new job, a family, a new phase in life, or in retirement, busyness is not only a feeling but also an identity we wear like a hard-won badge. It is a sign of our competence and usefulness.

We will not admit when we are tired, overwhelmed, or discouraged but we will tell people that we are busy. Our lives are highly structured for work, leisure, family matters, and everything to do with our own financial, mental, and physical well-being with little room for surprises and spontaneous human interactions.

We are also habituated to a lifestyle of convenient choices enabled by technology on our smart phones that make everything accessible to us without any human interaction. We dutifully indulge in Christian rituals like prayer, sharing Scriptures and testimonies through instant messaging without saying a single word to anyone. We swipe our phones multiple times a day but cannot remember when was the last time we reached out to hold someone’s hand or received a hug. We are so caught up in making life work that we have little room for anything unplanned from crises to conversations.

STANDOFF. STALEMATE. STATUS QUO. There are many ways to avoid crippling fears but the result is always the same – an unchanged state. We can ignore them long enough to push them into the subconscious mind, and avoid situations where they are likely to surface. Over time, however, the fear intensifies in the subconscious and surfaces in more areas of our lives and in unexpected ways.  Eventually, our Archilles heel becomes a formidable giant we try to keep away from.

If only the right choice is as simple as a straightforward cost and benefit analysis for arriving at the best consequences, or a mathematical formula that computes the greatest happiness or benefits for the greatest number of people. It would just be a matter of manipulating variables to create our desired outcomes. We need only to consider if, given a set of conditions that remain stable, A is worth giving up because B is hanging in the balance.

If we’re honest, we don’t like putting ourselves in unknown situations where we’re unsure of our ability to adapt or handle ourselves. There is no closer example than that we are all in the throes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution but many still remain digital migrants living in the margins of a new digital age.

As the saying goes, ‘What we don’t know won’t hurt us’; but hiding in ignorance puts a lid on how we experience life and relationships. How do we know if someone is living under a lid? You will hear common refrain like: I’m not cut out for it. I’ve enough to do every day. I’m happy with what I have, and so on. They put a lid on how much change is allowed in their lives. With regards to a God who seems incomprehensible, they’re happy to keep Him within the confines of rational thinking and resist any persuasions that require a change in them. In their minds, they say, God doesn’t push people to change.

Once in a while, we like to stop and look at the community of friends within BeInReach. For a start, the idea for BeInReach Ministry was seeded by old friends who were separated across the globe but remained close at heart. The imperative of lockdowns and social distancing to curb the spread of a menacing infection has repeatedly forced people to stay out of public places, avoid social gatherings, and retreat to the safety of their homes. This shifted everything online where people become part of an audience rather than being real people having real connections. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, many are facing tremendous challenges and holding up stoically, yet perilously, on their own.