Heart Tracks - Village Of Nain

    Louie Giglio, founder of the Passion gatherings, helped me to see a familiar passage of scripture in ways I've not seen it before.  We tend to take the miracles of Christ as related in His word at face value, and too often never see beyond the surface.  We miss so much in that.  In the passage found in Luke 7:11-17, Jesus and His disciples are approaching the village of Nain.  As they come near the the town gate, they encounter a funeral procession as a widow and her fellow mourners prepare to bury her only son.  This was a tragedy on every level as women of that day were very limited economically, and thus were dependent upon their husbands or sons.  To lose her only visible (key word) means of support was a devastation beyond description.  Into this sorrow and misery comes Jesus.  Scripture relates, "When the Lord saw her His heart went out to her and He said, 'Don't cry.'  The He went up and touched the bier (stretcher) they were carrying him on, and the bearers stood still.  He said, 'Young man, I say to you, get up!'  The dead man sat up, and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother."  I love how Giglio put this encounter, writing, "He met these people right in the middle of their parade of death."  

   We live in a world that stages "parades of death" every moment of every day.  It may well be that we are caught in the midst of one in our own lives right this moment.  Death in the form of devastating loss, disappointment, failure, addiction, divorce, and on and on.  Like the widow, we see no hope, and no help for it all.  We trudge on in the "parade," coming ever closer to our burial site, to the final and lasting defeat.  Could we dare to believe for Christ to enter into that parade, to interrupt it, stop it, and yes, transform it?  We may have read in His word that He gives beauty for ashes, but that can be hard to believe when we're caught in the parade of death.  Yet, even there, can we believe?  Will we believe? That He really will give us beauty for ashes?  As Giglio points out, Christ came upon that procession at just the right time.  Earlier or later, He would have missed it, but He didn't.  He was right on time.  Can we believe Him to be so in our parade of death?

   Do you know that the word  "Nain" means beauty?  Think on that, and think upon these words of Giglio's as well.  In the town of Nain, "Jesus stopped a funeral procession and walked up to a pile of ashes in the making and turned it into something beautiful."  More than once in my life, I have found myself in the "parade of death."  All I saw before me was the graveyard that awaited me.  Into every one of those parades, those processions, He came, interrupting the enemy's desire for me, breaking up the funeral walk planned for me, and turned it into a celebration. Mourning into dancing.  Beauty for ashes.  At the right time, in the right way.  The enemy of our souls may have convinced us that all we have is a pile of ashes.  Yet the Lord speaks to us through Ephesians 5:14, "Awake sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you."  From the ashes, beauty.  From death, life.  At the village of Nain, He gives us back our life, now filled with His life.

Blessings,
Pastor O