Hillside Free Methodist Church

Mark Adams, Pastor

Evan Help Us: Building Family Character #5 - Heal Together

There are so many make it or break it moments in our lives. Forks in the road. As individuals, as families, when faced with difficulties, the way we choose to handle them will have life-long, maybe even eternal impact. Some of us have been ravaged or devastated by war, destroying plans, leading to grave hardship and separating families. Some of us have been torn into by loss and grief. Some of us are ravaged by our sins or those of others, abusing substances, overspending, having affairs, brutal behavior. Some of us have been hit hard by illness and ravaged by the losses which accompany aging. Some of us are struggling financially, either through the loss of jobs or opportunities gone sour, or in some cases our own mismanagement. Our worlds are shaken. Our families are shaken.

Life is very difficult. There is much pain. There is much suffering. There are no examples of any of God’s saints in the Bible who had an easy time of it. I don’t know anyone who’s lived through mid-life without experiencing some form of pain of difficulty. The thing is, and I don’t know exactly why it is, it is the pain and difficulty which end up being the best tools for transformation. It is suffering and pain which lead to the greatest experiences of growth, of new and healthier ways of thinking, of greater clarity regarding who we are, who we love and who God is. Change and transformation do not occur without some element of pain.

John Ortberg, Willow Creek’s pastor of Small Group Ministries, conducted a survey of 2,000 people, asking them about what single factor led most to spiritual growth? The vast majority reported that it was pain and suffering. I think it is interesting to note that the majority of the Psalms in the Bible are Psalms of complaint, of suffering and asking God, “Why?”

I do not want to trivialize or over simplify pain and suffering into a few platitudes. But for the family who is suffering, and wondering why, let me suggest that perhaps your trials and pain may actually bring you closer together, and make you better people, to offer deeper appreciation for blessings you do have and to draw you nearer to God. Part of building the character of your family will almost certainly involve finding ways to move through pain and darkness together, supporting one another, and turning toward God together.

Listen to this encouraging text from Genesis, as we come to a close in our series, “Evan Help Us: Building Family Character.”

And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth." So God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth."

Noah and his family, after a year of living on the ark, finally came to the point where dry land was substantially revealed enough to allow the release of all the animals and of Noah and his family. And when this time came, God made a new covenant with Noah and his family. No more would God destroy life on earth in the way he had done. The sign of this covenant was a rainbow. I’ve come to think of rainbows as being wonderful signs of God’s grace. The ephemeral beauty of the colors displayed across the sky are really wonderful. One has said, “Life is like a rainbow, you need both sun and rain for it to appear.”

But what do rainbows follow? Rain. Storms. Darkness. When did Noah see the rainbow? After a long, long time of deep distress, deep loss, difficult work and hardship. The task of building the ark was no doubt quite difficult, for he and his family. But I cannot help but to think that they all lost friends and relatives in the flood. They lost their neighbors and their city and their country. They lost their homes where they had grown up all their lives. They lost any semblance of privacy as they were cloistered in a boat for a year together. Surrounded by animals. It’s hard enough for me to keep up with my pet dog, lizard and anaconda. To be the sole grounds-keepers for a floating zoo, totally locked indoors and at sea for a year – well it may been very busy and hard work that kept the family from growing depressed but it was also probably pretty nasty.

However, as my dad always said, “You gotta do what you gotta do.” We do not do what we want to do most of time, as human beings we do what we have to do to survive and further the well being of our families and communities. That takes sacrifice, that takes hardship, that takes perseverance through time of trouble.

Let’s take a look at our last clip from the film, Evan Almighty. We’ve been moving through the life of Noah in Genesis, but also checking out clips from the film. You are all invited to attend a showing of this movie - Evan Almighty - here at the church next Friday, October 12 at 7:30 PM. It’s a fun film and we’re also going to kick off Youth Group that evening. As we look at the clip, Morgan Freeman plays God. That may be theologically unsound – God is Spirit after all – but Freeman does a good job, better than George Burns. Lauren Graham plays Joan Baxter, Evan’s wife. Joan prays every night that God would do something to bring their family together, she prays this because of the schedule and workload they face the family has been growing apart. Joan gets very confused, even angry with God, when her husband declares the family has to build an ark, and seems to be going a little bit crazy. She doesn’t believe he’s hearing from God, and she’s certain that God isn’t answering her prayers. She’s angry, Evan is confused, the kids don’t know what’s going on. Then God visits in an unexpected way and explains what’s going on. Let’s see the clip.

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If you pray for strength, will God give you strength or opportunities to grow in strength? If you pray for togetherness, will God force your family together or give you opportunities to stick together? Through the Holy Spirit we have the strength and power to do amazing things, but just like many ingredients cannot take on their full flavor until exposed to heat, so too the power of God does not become evident until the pressures of life bring it out. As Saint Paul once wrote, when I am weak, then I am strong.

I don’t know why, but it seems that hardship is often God’s answer to our prayers. God is not a bully and laying layer upon layer of difficulty on our lives to make us squirm. It’s just that we will rarely take the initiative to change toward something more positive without it. C. S. Lewis wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. Pain is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” It often takes a difficulty, a loss, a pain to draw our attention to the truly important matters of life.

In Noah’s case, the hardship led to the salvation of the world. Noah’s wife could have left him as he went off on a crazy building venture, but she didn’t. His adult children could have walked away from the task, it was a daunting task, but they didn’t. The family certainly could have fallen apart if they had chosen to blame each other for the troubles in their lives, if they had decided that they didn’t need the hassles that family life tends to bring. But they chose to face the difficulty together and with two vital resources. God and each other.

Now, let me say that the each other part can be a bit tricky. Sometimes we can do more to harm to each other during a difficult situation than to help. I am reminded crab fishermen. If you watch them, you’ll notice that they do not put a lid on the buckets into which they put the crabs. They don’t have to, because the crabs police themselves. If one crab tries to crawl out of the bucket, one or two or more other crabs will latch onto and pull it back into the bucket. They’ve been caught, they’re about to dinner, but they will never escape because they tear each other down. They could just as easily form chains and bridges and help each other get out, but that’s not crab behavior. Often when the going gets tough, we will do all we can to pull others down with us. I know sometimes we think of crabby behavior as being grouchy, but it’s worse than that. It’s pulling others down when you’re all going through a rough patch. What difficulties are you facing right now? Don’t get crabby. Don’t pull each other down. Be a resource to each other, help each other, encourage each other, love each other. That’s what healthy, Christian families try to do.

I believe God is the key to this. Frankly, I suspect human beings tend to be a bit crabby. But God turns hearts focused on self-preservation at all costs into hearts desiring to love and to serve one another. In this way, during hardship, a family’s greatest resources are God and each other – each other includes the church.

Many of us in this church know, met and have heard internationally acclaimed motivational speaker Mawi Asgedom. He is an Ethiopian refugee, who was forced with this brother and sister and parents to leave their country when he was about three years old. The war between Ethiopia and Eritrea had broken out, a civil war, and it was (and remains) devastating. They lived for three more years in a Sudanese refugee camp before coming to the United States. His father, who was a doctor in Ethiopia was only able find work as a janitor in Illinois, and Mawi and his siblings saw their once proud father reduced to a man of deep tears and sadness. Mawi faced discrimination and teasing from his new American peers as he grew up but he learned two basic rules of life from his father, “Always respect others and always work hard.” These rules led him to work harder than most of his peers, earning generally A’s throughout his school years and granting him staring positions on his school basketball teams.

He writes, “I would get home from sports at 6pm, eat, help out around the house and study until midnight. Then I would get up at 6am and do it all over again. The hard work paid off. I often got the highest grades in the class and I carried an “A” through the entire first semester. I was getting strait A’s in all of my classes. And then the drunk driver killed Tewolde [my older brother]. And everything fell apart. I kept asking myself, how could something this beautiful be stolen by someone else’s recklessness? If that’s what life is like, what are we striving for, anyway? Giving up seemed like a good option...”

I believe that many of us feel like giving up when we are struck upside the head with a massive difficulty. Some of feel like giving up when we get a hangnail! But Mawi continues.

“Giving up seemed like a good option, but I loved my family too much. And I remembered Tewolde, who never gave up. So I turned to God for strength, and I pushed myself even harder.”

Later, Mawi would go on to Harvard and graduated with honors, being elected class marshal and delivering the commencement address in 1999. This would have made his father proud, but like his brother Tewolde, his father was killed by a drunk driver one year before graduating from Harvard. Mawi writes of what he learned in all this.

“Harvard university taught me well, but my true education came from less likely sources. I look back and see angels like the Charlenes and Rayens (Christians who took Mawi under their wing), I look back and see God’s servants, dressed as beggars and beetles. I look back to my inspirations, to Mama and Tewolde, and I see true guidance staring back at me. True power comes from what we can give, not what we can take... As they say in my country, “Izgihare Yihabkoom” – May God give to you.”

Mawi and his family suffered loss after loss, but as they turned to God and to each other, they found strength after strength and found ways to turn suffering into times of healing.

This is not to say that in all of our suffering or difficulty we will emerge Harvard graduates with a good story to tell, or that after losing our job or getting a positive result on the medical test that suddenly a rainbow will appear.

However, as we look at the life of Noah, we discover something about resilience and dealing with hardship. I think it’s interesting that the doctors of the Mayo Clinic have as similar list. We’ve been looking at the life of Noah and how this relates to building family character. We’ve seen family character is built through play, work, worship, prayer and today, the ability to heal through tough times by relying on God and each other.

Here’s what the Mayo Clinic says. To be resilient during the hard times of life, develop these five strategies...

Fifth, “Take care of yourself.” We didn’t actually touch on this during the Noah series directly. But essentially, eat right and exercise. Even if you have arthritis or lung disease or sit in a wheelchair, doing all possible to stay fit is critical to a sense of emotional and even spiritual well-being, according to the clinic. I agree, but I didn’t see any evidence of weight sets or a running track being installed on the ark. Still, it’s good advice.

Fourth, “Maintain perspective.” Or as we saw, worship together. Having a larger view of reality, and finding ways not to make yourself the center of the universe will give you the bearings and awareness to overcome difficulties.

Third, “Work toward goals.” Or as we saw, work together. Having a purpose and a to do list is more than a tool for being productive, it’s a strategy for getting up each day and overcoming the pain and burdens of life.

Second, “Develop a sense of humor.” Or, as we saw, play together. As the clinic doctors say, “If you can’t find something to laugh about in your situation, then turn to something outside of your situation to laugh with – a funny movie or joke book for example.”

First, “Get Connected.” Keep your family relationships strong, develop friendships, do volunteer work with an organization where see people and develop relationships. Being part of the human web of relationships is, for Mayo clinic, the first and best resource for dealing with hardship.

We need God and each other to heal from the wounds that arise from simply living in this difficult world. As we’ve learned from the life of Noah, we find family character blossoming to the degree that we learn to play together, work together, worship together, pray together and commit above all to weather any storm, and rather tear each other down during difficult times, to heal together.

Jesus, the very son of God, suffered on a cross. No rainbows. He died. But even through this act of self-sacrifice, we find his love for the human family abundantly clear and the resurrection provides certain hope that continuing through suffering, even if it costs us our fleshly life, will someday yield the best life of all.

As a family, what are you praying for? To be closer? To be more successful? To be stronger? To have more peace? Look to the challenges that come your way as the means to find an answer to your prayers. Make the decision today that you will cling, even through whatever storm you are riding this morning, to the two fundamental resources God gives to us – God himself and our friends and family. We need God and we need each other.

As we learn to work with one another, and to turn to God during suffering, we will discover healing and strength in our lives. Storms will come and go, and we may be hit and scarred and move through days of doubt and desires to give up, but as we rely upon God and each other, we will come through these storms stronger that ever. Look for the rainbows at the end of your difficulty. Cherish them. Talk about them as a family, and give thanks to God and to each other for the role played in surviving and healing. And when the day comes, and it will for it comes to us all, when one of the waves of life washes us from this earthly shore, as we cling to Jesus Christ, we will arrive on that celestial shore. That’s the ultimate rainbow, and Christ has paved the way.

Please receive this Celtic prayer:

“May God give you...For every storm a rainbow, for every tear a smile, for every care a promise and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life sends, a faithful friend to share, for every sigh a sweet song and an answer for each prayer.”