Jesus Sonders

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR James 1:1–4 (NIV) James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations: Greetings. Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. CONSIDER My youngest daughter, Lily, taught me a new word. She’s in college and brilliantly insightful. She’s the professor of empathic wisdom and encouragement on the faculty at Seedbed. The word is sonder. Though it is apparently still making its way to the dictionary, it is a real word. And my autocorrect wants to keep changing it to wonder (which is a delicious irony as you will soon see). To sonder means to realize that every single person you come across and encounter is experiencing a life just as complicated, complex, and intricately challenging as yours is. Jesus sonders. Jesus has sondered among us, hasn’t he? Job losses, sickness, cancer, financial distress, broken marriages, wayward children, besetting addictions, tragic deaths, even suicide—these are the challenges and hardships being endured by some of Jesus’s most faithful followers. Imagine the multitudes of people without Jesus navigating these waters. One of my favorite country songs from years back spoke of love being a house and noting that it was the only house large enough to hold all the pain in the world. To that I would add this: in the house of love, which is the house of God, there is a hard-to-find room where pain finds its purpose. That room is joy. James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations: Greetings. Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds . . . How’s that for an opening line! To the followers of Jesus scattered all over the world: Hello, I know things are really hard right now. You are struggling mightily with all kinds of difficulties and trials. I have two surprising words to share with you: pure joy. Why? James begins this way because this is how life is for everyone and because the followers of Jesus have an opportunity to play the long game with pain and become signposts of the slow-rising beauty of redemption. He says “consider it pure joy” because Jesus can and will assign purpose to your pain. He can and will bring transformation into your trial. Don’t let those four words—“consider it pure joy”—be lost on you. . . . because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. A word of caution for encouragers. It is not encouraging for people in a painful trial to hear things like “God has a reason for everything,” as though he has somehow purposed and designed this suffering for our good. That’s not encouraging. It’s really just a way we shield ourselves from the insecurity we feel when something bad happens to someone good. Everything that happens is not God’s will, but God has a will in everything that happens. To encourage someone in the midst of a trial is to greet them with the embrace of Jesus, welcome them into the house of love, and sit with them until they are ready to walk again. And then wander in the wilderness with them until Jesus leads them into the room of joy, where he himself, in his timing, assigns purpose and meaning to the painful trial. It can take years. This is what he does. He doesn’t need explainers. He needs people who will sonder and then wander and then wonder but mostly love, love, love. That is the shape and sequence of encouragement. Sondering is step one. It is the deep disposition of an encourager, moving about daily life knowing every single person we pass is dealing with a complex set of challenges and likely facing some level of pain and often just struggling with every fiber of their being to hold it together. And this is not to mention the people we already know and love. To sonder is to walk about with wonder at the “trials of many kinds” everyone around us is dealing with every day. Jesus sonders. Thanks, Lily. PRAY Father, thank you for always listening, for hearing our cries of desperation, for loving us. Thank you for sending your Son, Jesus, to sonder among us, to wander alongside us and reinterpret even the worst suffering of all—his own—and thereby to reinterpret our own trials. Oh, Jesus, how we need you and how we need more of you in us so you can be with others in and through us. Come, Holy Spirit, and lead us deeper into this marvelous mystery, for nothing is more encouraging than this. In Jesus’s name, amen.