ENCOUNTER

Think about the craziest experience you ever had. What was going through your mind at the time? Was it staring down the eye of a tornado barreling straight towards you? Was it meeting the partner of your dreams? Was it a supernatural encounter?

No matter what it was, the experience itself must be a massive part of who you are today. It is likely that preserving a memory like this would feel really important. Writing it into words, sharing it with friends and family, even creating a voice memo! Whatever it takes to protect the story. Memories alone are never quite enough to honor the most incredible moments of our lives. Pictures, video, story, writing… However you chose to remember it, I hope you can look at that and feel the same emotions you once felt. However, I can guarantee you that there was almost certainly one thing you were not thinking about while you recorded your experiences.

Who would potentially see your story 2,000 years later.

Somehow, the majority of the Christian church has disconnected the human element from the divinity of the scriptures. The gospels are the irrefutable story of Jesus, but they are also the recollection of human beings. Human beings who aimed for nothing more than to record and protect the single most life altering experience they ever had. This man, Jesus, was within Himself the most all consuming reality that transformed everything around Him. They had to record it all, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of the world.

What I am saying is this; so many times, it can feel really easy to read stories from the gospels and find ways to apply them to our own lives. This is a beautiful thing, and I believe the Holy Spirit often invites us into these moments. However, I believe it is equally important to recognize that it wasn’t “us” that Jesus was thinking about when He was doing ministry; the only thing on His mind in these moments, was the person who was in front of Him.

I am pointing this out for a very specific reason. Jesus was to those in front of Him, what He needed to be to the person in front of Him. He never contradicted His own nature, but His methodology for the administration of His power would vary greatly from person to person. For one, it was about faith. For someone else, it was giving up wealth. For the next, it was an overwhelming amount of love and kindness in the face of constant rejection. It could even range so far as to Jesus spitting on a man’s eyes to heal him! What I think is fascinating is that Jesus did not only heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead, but He did something else just as powerful alongside it.

Jesus said of Himself in Luke 4 before He said almost anything else, that He came to heal the broken hearted. The root word for broken hearted here actually means “shattered mind.” The same root phrase where we get the word “trauma.” What this means, is that before Jesus actually came to cast out demons or heal the sick, He came to decimate trauma. I believe that while Jesus was preforming His miracles, He was almost always doing something else at the same time. He handled each interaction so differently, not so we could read it a certain way years later, but for the sake of the person in front of Him. He was not only healing their body or casting out the demons, but He was also healing their trauma in the exact same moment in a way that was specific to each person.

My favorite example of this is the blind man. Some people don’t know this, but in Jewish culture, the religious leaders actually believed that when someone was blind, it was God punishing them. They believed it meant that either they had sinned, or the parents of this individual had sinned. Due to this, the leaders would actually spit on the blind and the crippled, and essentially laugh at them while doing so. Jesus has not only the blind man’s eyes in mind as He is healing Him, but his heart as well. Jesus healed him by spitting on his eyes! God used the very thing that had been used to traumatize him his entire life, as if to say, “Not only am I healing your eyes, but I am healing your heart, too.”  It’s genuinely stunning with this context!

Some scientists lay the claim that there are two primary ways to rewrite the sub-conscious mind. Hypnosis, which is questionable at best, and constant repetition. Despite these things, I actually believe in a third supernatural way. I believe that Jesus Himself actually specializes in encounters that completely rewrite our sub-conscious mind. This is why each interaction He has with each person is so distinctly different. I wanted to take a lot of time to point out that the Bible isn’t written with us in mind, because Jesus was so intensely focused on interacting with each person the way that they needed to experience God to see all trauma healed. Jesus still does this today! It is actually through a unique and individual experience with Jesus that the entire framework for the way we think can change in an instant.

Jesus isn’t just in the business of healing us and leaving it at that. He wants to restore us from the very deepest core of our being, and it is through a meeting with the Living God that we can see our entire way of thinking shifted in a moment! I believe that Jesus wants to meet with you where ever you are at today. It won’t look like the next person, and it won’t look like the last person. It will however, look like exactly what you need it to be, to see the entire framework of your existence changed and re-written. He did this with me when I was 17 for the very first time in my own life, and He has continued to do it since then. I believe He can do it for you too! Pray this with me today:

Jesus! I pray that you would meet with me in this moment. Show me you are realer than my conception of reality, and that you want to meet with me in a way that I won’t be able to doubt. I want to experience you, and I allow you to come into my life in any way that you want. You have permission to rewire my sub-conscious mind, and make me just like you!