The news cycle is moving faster and faster. Wars rage around the world. Our cultural fabric seems to be ripping at the seams. It feels as if the center cannot hold. As if the world is falling apart.

Perhaps you’ve felt this way not just about the world around you but about your own life. The loss of a job or a loved one. The weight of an injustice levied against you. Illness and suffering. It can feel as if life is falling apart.

But the letter to the Colossians argues that the center does hold. That Christ, the center, holds all things together. And the second half of letter invites us to consider what it looks like to live a life that is pulled into the orbit of Christ’s love.

Paul’s encouragement to the first-century followers of Jesus in Colossae was that no matter what they were facing, they could hold onto the hope that Jesus was holding them fast.

Standing on the edge of fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were able to actually embody what it means to have faith. To believe that God is good and trustworthy beyond the assurance of a guaranteed outcome. They knew God was not only in control of their story but walking it out with them. 

Their faith was not contingent upon whether God would save them. Even if God didn’t, it was enough for them to know that God could. It was enough to know that God would be with them regardless of the outcome.

Whatever moment we think will swallow us up is swallowed up by the moment when Jesus gives his life so that we can live the life of faith.  It's a moment that says, 'O death where is thy sting, O grave where is thy victory?'"

Rahab was a woman, a Canaanite, and a prostitute. She is the kind of person the Israelites would have written off and ignored.

And yet, her faith in the God of Israel defies expectations. Before she even asked to be included amongst the people of God, she offers that kind of inclusion to the Israelite spies. In faith, she’s already done the very thing that she hoped God would do for her.

As she welcomed enemy spies, she trusted that God would welcome her. As she provided safety to them, she prayed God would provide safety to her. As she protected the life of another by endangering her own, she had faith that God would protect her.

Who have you already written off that God has not?  Maybe it’s someone you categorize as not belonging for whatever reason or maybe it’s yourself.

This was a special morning of worship we called More to Your Story. We dedicated an hour to sing and pray together, engage with scripture, and reflect upon our own stories. This summer we’ve been revisiting some of the most famous and familiar stories in the Old Testament and allowing the enduring powers of these narratives to shape and reshape our lives.  

But instead of asking these questions of an Old Testament narrative, we’re asking these questions of ourselves. You can use the handout attached below to answer these questions. You’ll also need three different colored pencils, pens, or markers.

So, who are you and who are the people close to you with whom you share this life?  What is the setting of your story and why is it relevant to who you are and what you’re called to?  And how is God at work in your story?

In The Odyssey, Odysseus’ crew couldn’t trust his promise that they would survive without eating the cattle. In Exodus, Israel couldn’t trust God’s promise while Moses was on the mountain. And in our lives, we struggle to trust God while we’re waiting for the next chapter of our own stories.

Like the Israelites, who make and worship a Golden Calf, we often turn to other things to try to save us—whether approval, success, or security. The Israelites’ problem wasn’t that they stopped believing in God. Their problem was that God wasn’t moving on their timetable.

And we do the same thing. We may never melt down jewelry to make a golden calf, but we do become impatient with God’s timing, and in that impatience, we are constantly tempted to place our trust in whatever promises relief right now. But nothing we turn to can accomplish what Christ accomplished for us when he bore our sin, defeated death, and rose again.

None of us hear the stories of the Bible in a vacuum.  We show up to them with our own values, assumptions, and life experiences and we use these things to help us make meaning out of these stories.

Similarly, Abraham used his own values, assumptions, and previous experiences with the gods of the ancient world to make sense of this God, the God of Israel.

But what Abraham soon discovers is that this God is different than all of the others. That this God has our best interest at heart. God proves this to Abraham in Genesis 22 and Jesus proves to us, that this God longs to bless us, so that we might be a blessing to others.

Rocky. Mulan. Aladdin. The 1980 USA Olympic hockey team.

What do they all have in common? They’re all underdog stories. And we love them.

We often think of David and Goliath as an underdog story but there’s actually more to the story. It’s the story of what happens when people turn away from God and put their trust in something else. It’s a story about God giving his people what they wanted. It’s a story about a God who "having disarmed the powers and authorities, made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross." It’s a story with a hero, but we are not the hero. Neither is Saul, nor David, but it is the Lord.

Of all the ways God could have chosen to reveal God’s self to the world, why stories? Why not a systematic theology textbook? Or an easy to read list of principles? Why not just a giant collection of rules?

Often we just want the point, the lesson, the answer, the takeaway, but stories, good stories, work differently. Stories invite us to slow down and get curious. To notice details and ask questions.

This goal this summer is to allow ourselves to wonder and wander through the tried and true stories of the Old Testament and along the way, we might discover there’s more to the story than we thought.

The road to healing, strength, and peace is not a smooth digital superhighway spanning the universe. It's a river that grinds away our rough edges so that we can embody the other-oriented love of God.

The world tells us that the best life is one of comfort and ease, one without struggle, one that is padded and comfortable. 

But that’s a lie.  The best life is the one that Jesus lived in the real world. And the real world is full of friction. It’s one full of difficulty and injustice. Jesus could have cheat-coded his way through this life and didn’t. He didn’t opt out of painful things, and he followed the way set before him all the way to the cross. And there, he shows us what it means to be deeply human.

What happens online stays online, right? Surely the rage baiting and the angry comments sections don’t have an effect upon the real world?

Well, we’re learning they do and perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising when we consider that for the first 6 years of Facebook’s existence, the official slogan emblazoned on the walls of its corporate headquarters was “Move Fast and Break Things.” It seems that the whole world has adopted that slogan, moving faster and faster and breaking more and more things.

But the good news of Jesus invites us not to move fast or to break things but to move slow and heal things. The writer of James says to “be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.”