A Little Road Work

A Little Road Work

I have never met anyone who didn’t need a little repair work.

Perhaps that’s acknowledging that no one is perfect.

I have met many who had no idea what repair work they needed. That’s certainly been true of me. For most of us it takes a crisis to make us stop long enough to see that something needs to be fixed.

I knew a person once who was a virtuoso piano player. It was amazing to listen to her play. She was incredibly dedicated. Well, actually she was driven: she practiced so long and hard that she ruptured some tendons in her hand.

But, she never really knew what drove her until she began to discover who Jesus Christ was and what he wanted to do in her life.

He wanted to make her into a new person. But, first he had to repair her past, a past she was pretty much blind to.

This Sunday at the Gathering Church, I continue the series, Free for Freedom: Removing Roadblocks from Life with God. Some roadblocks to a life-changing relationship with God aren’t easy to spot, especially ones that were created in our past.

In John 4:4-29, Jesus meets a woman who has a past that needs repair. She didn’t bring it up. Jesus did. Then she attempted to change the subject to a religious controversy, which is always a good tact when Jesus starts getting too close.

She assumed that the wounds of her past would disqualify her from what Jesus was offering. And, anyway, she had accepted her wounds and had adjusted her life to their reality.

How surprised she was to discover that her past was what qualified her most to be truly loved and transformed.

Not so with the way most of us have learned to do church or life. We’ve taught ourselves to hide rather than be repaired, healed and restored.

This Sunday we invite Jesus to do some road work.  He’s pretty good at it.