Following

Hello to all! Once again I have to apologize for how infrequently I make the time to post here. Life seems to move at a breakneck speed a lot of the time, and weeks pass so quickly. I promise to keep trying to put something down at least once a week; many times I have great intentions, but they are unrealized. I ask for grace and patience!

This week in BSF we've been looking at Matthew 8. It's a chapter full of miraculous healings and freedom from demons. The last story in particular caught my attention. It's the one about the demon-possessed men in the tombs. Jesus heals the men and allows the demons to go into a group of pigs that subsequently jump off a cliff. This story has always been a little funny to me (pigs committing suicide? who says the Bible isn't full of interesting visual images!), but what grabbed me this time was the reaction of the people in the town after Jesus has healed the men. Instead of being amazed and begging Jesus to spend time in their town, they immediately ask him to leave. In fact, Matthew says "they pleaded with him to leave their region." Why in the world did they do this? Didn't Jesus just perform a pretty spectacular miracle? Wouldn't you think they would want more of that?

It made me look a little deeper at their reaction. Why wouldn't you want more of Jesus? And then it hit me: people do this today. There are lots of people who know of Jesus, who know a little bit of Him and have heard His name. They know He did some good stuff a long time ago. They may even know that He died on the cross for their sins, and they might believe that to be true. But it ends there. They don't want any more; they don't want their lives to change. Change is scary, and truly following Christ requires an openness to change that exceeds most people's comfort zones. If the people Matthew is writing about allowed themselves really to embrace what Jesus' authority to cast out demons meant, they would have to change their worldviews. They would have to listen and examine their own lives; they would have to surrender some of the authority they believed they had over their lives if Jesus really was who the demons said He was. If the demons are scared of this man, then He has some serious power! They didn't want to have to think about that.

I have to say, when I meet new people and they find out that Trevor and I left a church position in Colorado to become support-raising missionaries to college students, the most common question is, "Wow, weren't you scared with a family to support?" It is difficult for many people to understand why we would do something like this. Many say, "you guys must be stronger than me! I could never do that." But I think that's the point: we could never do this on our own. We never would do this of our own volition. It takes a trust that I never believed I had. It takes a whole new level of faith that I, honestly, never really thought I needed. But when you tell Jesus that you're all in, that you want to follow Him no matter what to the ends of the earth, He takes you at your word. Sure, the strength and faith and trust are all prompted by the Holy Spirit living in us, but we had to choose to step. To move. And we're definitely not super-spiritual holy beings-I'm pretty sure most of you reading this know just how human our family is! But we made a decision to follow Christ. And as we've been sanctified and stretched and grown by His grace, He's given us more steps to take.

So we choose to allow Him in. We choose to let Him wreak havoc on the lives we so carefully constructed. And it's scary, and messy, and some days I want to plead with Jesus to leave us alone!

But I don't. Because He does everything in love. Because He loves us too much to leave us in our junk. And because I hope that He'll use our journey to encourage just one other person to decide to follow Him wholeheartedly.

It's a wild ride, but we wouldn't trade it for anything.

Blessings,
The Bush Family