Navigating Lifequakes: Embracing Change with Faith

And that is actually something that has largely shaped that millennial generation. Maybe not an exact moment, but there was a release moment. And then we have Generation Z, which is kind of the prevalence of social media. The COVID -19 pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, the Black Lives Movement are some of those defining moments. So we all have those as a collective and sometimes involuntary, sometimes voluntary lifequakes. But we also have those as personal and voluntary or involuntary. [00:29:06]

So, but when we look at Jesus's baptism in this passage, the baptism for Jesus, is that personal involuntary. He chooses to go down to the shores where his cousin John the Baptist is and enter into those waters. And he I'm sure knows in some way, shape or form that the spirit is going to fall on him and become that defining moment, that demarcation line where he is now launching into his earthly ministry and living into his mission. [00:31:13]

And so Jesus is setting kind of the stage for us. And I want to look at how his ministry goes through a life transition some so that we can maybe learn from that as well. Because when we experience a lifequake, the goal is to transition into a place that is filled with. With the light of Christ and the love of God. The light and the love is where we want that transition to begin to go towards. [00:32:49]

The life -quake represents that period of chaos. The life transition represents the way forward. Now, Fieler gives us insight into the life transition. He says there are three phases to a transition, the long goodbye, the messy middle, and the new beginning. But the reality is that these steps do not happen in a straight line. [00:34:31]

And that long goodbye is really the grief process, the acceptance that the old way of life is over, that this event that happened has shaken your world so dramatically, so drastically, that the old life is now gone. It can be really captured by those five stages of grief that I'm sure most of us have heard, denial, anger, bargaining. depression, and acceptance, right? [00:35:51]

And so Jesus is saying that long goodbye. He's tempted by the things that, you know, if you remember the story, you know, the devil says, you know, you know, turn the devil away. Put his rock into bread, you know, jump from the cliff, you know, trust the angels. He's tempting him with all these worldly temptations that, hey, if you're really the Messiah, you can do all this, and you can skip the rest of the process, right? [00:37:04]

And so I think as we take that view, and then we look at our own long goodbye, most likely it's not going to be 40 days, okay? It's going to be 40 months. It's going to be 40 decades. I don't know, but it's going to be long, right? One of the things that we see in the life transition is they're much longer than we might expect. [00:37:50]

The life quake has caused chaos. And the messy middle is the phase where you come out of that chaos. And you start to pick up the pieces and put things back together. It's often a mashup of the grief of the long goodbye and the hope of the new beginning. Jesus' ministry definitely had a messy middle. [00:41:16]

And now they live in Cuyahoga Falls. They own their own home. They both have full -time jobs. My brother is a creative director for a garage door manufacturing company. Not exactly what he was doing before, right? But that lifequake, that collective involuntary event, led them to them deciding to do their own lifequake, pick everything up, and transition to a new place and a new life. [00:47:45]

new beginning is when your vision begins to adjust to the light of Christ and the love of God. Right. When we come out of a dark place and we go into the bright light, our eyes have to adjust. Our pupils have to dilate. We have to focus and reorient in a certain way. And just as the Israelites, when they they got out of slavery in Egypt and they're wandering through the desert and they go to Moses and I can just kind of suck. [00:49:57]

Jesus, and when we see every part of Jesus' ministry, he eats with sinners, he talks to prostitutes, he talks to tax collectors, he meets with people, and he sees beyond the labels, and he sees the soul, he sees the person. Over the last five years, the world has become so polarized that we oftentimes no longer see the person, but simply see the label. [00:53:51]

In order, though, then, to begin to resist that dehumanization, regardless of the side of the aisle, the color of the skin, the economic condition, the gender, the sexual orientation, I don't care what it is. We have to see the person resisting that dehumanization. And we'll go into the details. But my own wife. In the last. Two months. Experienced this very, very seriously. Online. [00:56:18]