Roots and Miracles

So today my wife and I had a pretty full Saturday.  The day started with a soccer tournament for the youth from our mission churches.  It was a good time and cool to see all of our church plants come together and do something.  Valles (the church where I work) came in third place.  On saturday nights we have our group for people who are HIV positive or have AIDS.  I felt as though the message that was shared was great and important enough to be passed on to my blog.  Another pastor on staff came and shared about roots.  More specifically roots of issues.  Often times as Christians we judge based off of symptoms that we see or experience.  For example, if I see a mother miss-treating her son, or someone lying constantly, I tend to judge their actions as wrong and then can easily jump to conclusions about them as individuals.  What we really need to do is look deeper at the root causing this behavior, and as believers, do our best to speak into their lives the answer to the root issue, not necessarily the behavior displayed by the root issue.  I think that this is a great lesson for all of us to grab hold of.  Even in our own lives we tend to judge our actions based off of purely what we see happening while maybe there is something deeper we need to address.  I love the example of pulling weeds, if we break it off at the ground it will disappear for awhile, and we may even think we have beat it, but if we don’t get that root pulled out, it will return.  I challenge you to examine your life and see if there is a root or two that still needs yanked.

 

Speaking of our HIV group, this week we saw what we are claiming as a miracle for my good friend Robin.  Robin had the original idea of starting this support group; he is a HIV patient who was given 5 months to live about a year and a half ago.  He understands the only reason he has any hope is because of Jesus, and with his inspiration we started this group.  Robin was hospitalized for a period because of this virus, and has battled quite a bit.  We have all been praying and believing for his healing.  Last week Robin went for a routine check up of some various cell count numbers and a check on his defenses.  There is a lot of science involved here but the bottom line is that the test results came back and the doctor told Robin that his HIV is now “almost undetectable.”  The doctor said that the medical treatment Robin is on must have been working…He doesn’t know that because of the side affects Robin did not take the medical treatment…Praise God.

 

God Bless.

 

Josh