James Harmer

  Do people ever stop and think about how everyone around them acts?  Do we often look at other people and think they have it easier than us?  I know that I have done that alot… and many people have told me that they do.  We get mad at somebody because maybe we are having a bad day, and they walk by smiling.  Or maybe we never had a family, were left to die and have had to fight to make it through life and we get mad when we see other people enjoying life with their families.  We get jealous and think that they don’t understand pain because they haven’t experienced yours.  I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t experienced any ones pain but my own, but I’ll also proclaim that the way to deal with any kind of pain is not to get mad at everyone who doesn’t experience yours.

  What?  Some of you think…  “How dare you give me advice about something you never went through!!”  Well, if that’s how you feel then don’t read this.  But before you do I would like to point something else out.  I know people who have been through Hell and back, people from many different sides of life, one of which is my father, another is Mike who my family took in(My new Bro.)  Those are just two examples, Mike went through things that I assure you most of you(If not all of you) have never and can never go through.  But you know what?  He let go of his pride and listened to someone one day who was talking and ignored the voices in his head telling him that the guy didn’t know what he had been through so he couldn’t relate.  And he’s free from his past now and is going to have a family some day that he will know how to treat right.  He will love his son the way he was never loved, and he will treat his wife the way his mother was never loved, and he will protect his children from the things he was never protected from.

  People, including myself like I said in my profile… we often put up guards for any personal area of our life, anywhere that we are voulnerable.  Many of us are not afraid to believe in a “God”, but as soon as you mention Jesus(Yeshua) people get very upset.  You see, God sounds like some big old man in the sky… this guy who just kinda looks at us and sees what we do, and judges based on our heart or doesn’t judge at all… or whatever.  He hears prayers and answers sometimes… He’s just kinda, there.  But you see, Jesus implies something more.  

  Christianity is more than a Religion, it presents us with a Relationship with God.  That’s not just an old man in the sky, it’s a person who wants to know us.  Why call God a person?  Well, person does not mean human.  It shows basically that God is not an “it”, He is real and alive, and wants to know us.  Why don’t we like that?  Because we are afraid of a real relationship because at some point we have been hurt by someone, or many people, or maybe everyone who ever came in to our life has hurt us!!  Maybe a person who was supposed to be a representative of God/Jesus hurt us(A priest, preacher, pastor… etc.)  The point is, we fear intimate relationships and have a hard time trusting because we have been hurt.  Can we ever possibly get past this?  Will this rule our life forever?  Yeah, without knowing Christ, we are ruled by our past.  It’s reality and what happens to us shapes us and chips away at who we really are.  Behind those scars, there is a real person who existed once.. but was ruined by this world.  

  Our culture tells us we are just a product of our environment… and then they tell us at the same time to “find ourself.”  Well, the only thing that even motivated us to find ourself is someone who is a part of our environment who told us to do it.  And when we do that, we still let ourselves attach events and things that happened to us to who we are.  That line of thinking leads people into these circular reasoning traps that eventually lead to major deppresion.  We still fear real relationships.  We still can not trust. .. and we honestly believe that is who we really are?  We honestly believe that if we took away everything that happened to us in the past, we would think that way?  It’s not who we are, it’s who we let the world make us.  Who we are lies behind the scars.

  I was thinking about some things the other day.  Some things that happened in my past.  And as I thought about them I felt the sense of freedom from them that I didn’t know was possible.  I thought about things people did to me, thigns people I loved said to me… things that really hurt.  And I was able to love the people who did them to me.  I was able to forgive them.  That is not the result of “Finding Myself.”  That is not a result of my environment either.  Want me to tell you what it is?  Well, keep reading.

  What does Jesus do.  We see shirts with things like “WWJD” on them… but what would He do?  Or rather, what does He do?  Does He hold up a bar and say “Here is what you must do to go to Heaven!” Does He Answer our prayers?  Does He forgive our sins?  Does He bless us?  Does He curse us?  Does He punish?

  All of those are things people think He does, and some are things He does do.  But one thing He does is show us who we really are.  He can remove the scars, heal the wounds inside us and “Restore the years the locusts have eaten away”(Joel 2:25.)  He can restore that which was lost.  To know Him is to get back what was stolen.  This girl last night, at a prayer meeting at my Church(CFC) went up for prayer and asked us all if we could pray for her.  She was hesistent and we did not want to try an force her to do anything, but she(on her own) said “I want to be set free from a Virus that is from a former lifestyle.”  Now we did not look on her with Judgment, we looked at her the same way that Jesus does, with Love.  We prayed for her and found that this lifestyle was haunting her and trying to tell her that it was who she was, and that she could not be free from it.  She prayed with some girls who understood where she was coming from and it was an amazing night, an amazing thing to see an amazing God set her free from her past.  I started to cry just watching and thought “God, this is who you are!”

  You can’t imagine being free… you can’t imagine being able to smile again, maybe you can’t imagine wanting to be alive again.  I’ve got news for you, nobody without Christ can.  They can lie and put on a plastic face, they can get trapped in the circle of “Finding yourself.”  But this girl, she could not see freedom, because to her it did not exist.  She had to take the step of reaching out for a hand she could not see, a hope she could not feel.  She had to believe that not only “Could” God heal her, but that He “Would” and wanted to.  And that she could rely on Him.  Now she has her life back, she can smile again…  she can Live again(Christ says He gives us Life and Life more abundantly!!)  The mask is gone, the scars are healed.

  We want to rely on ourself, but we can’t.  Just like others, we will let ourself down.  Dare to take that step?  Dare to remove the mask?  Even if right now what’s underneath is Ugly?  Scary?  You think God will reject it if He sees it?  You think He’s like people?  Maybe you have “Already tried Religion”, well I don’t care.  Trying Religion and knowing Jesus are two different things.  You hear people talk about being Born Again all the time.  Want to know what it really means?  Everything about you that is the result of this world is gone, it dies.  You are born again and are who you really are.  You are a New Creation and what used to be what defined you is gone.  It’s literally like being born a second time.

I challenge you, don’t try to find yourself…
Let Him find you.  He’s much better at it.

Peace,

-James’