Mud In Your Eyes

New Years, as fun as it was, is always a bit of a let down. It never lives up to its expectations. I did however enjoy my New Years Eve. Rock Band is simply amazing.

So I ran out of coffee filters the other day. How does that happen? I feel like that's something that you should see coming. Thanks to good friends that are gracious enough to give me some coffee filters.

Thanks to everyone for your prayers and encouragements, it really does mean a lot. God is big, really big.

John chapter 9 has become one of my favorite chapters in the Bible. Its the story of when Jesus heals a man born blind. The chapter starts off with the disciples asking the question, "who sinned, this man or his parents? that he was born blind?" Interesting question. Jesus lets them know that it was neither, but it was so that work of God could be displayed in his life. Back to the question though. They are asking essential what is the source of this imperfection. I was trying to think why I would ask this question, why I would want to know how this man ended up being born blind. I came to conclusion that I would probably ask this question to know how to avoid this happening to me.
I think this lets us in on how humans view sin and how it affects our lives. Our view of sin is far to small. We think of it only as the actions that we do, things we do wrong. Its much bigger than that. Sometimes I feel like we look at sin as something, for some unknown reason, God chose to hate and the only reason we're not supposed to do it is because God just doesn't like it. God doesn't like sin because God can't like sin. Its the complete opposite of God. Sin is rebellion to God. Sin is what has broken and destroyed God's creation. Its more than just what we do, its what we're born into. This man's blindness wasn't the result of some one's individual sin, but it was the result of being born into a war-torn creation that has been devastated by sin. A bit of helplessness creeps in.
I feel like they're asking the question in hopes of discovering some sort of formula. What must I do/not do, what steps do I have to take in order to prevent this from happening to me? We can't, we're broken. We need to be fixed. We need the work of God, we need to be restored. That's what Jesus does...
Its bizarre actually. Jesus spit in the dirt, made a mud pie and smeared it on the man's eyes. This is how Jesus heals him. Interesting. The debate is over the the cause of the blindness. Jesus somewhat answers the question with the method of the healing. See in Genesis chapter 2 it says that God formed man from the dust, from the dirt. He breathed into it. Jesus heals the man with what he's made out of.
We're broken versions of what we were meant to be. We need the work of God in our lives. We need to be restored. The hope though is that Jesus doesn't want to make us into something we're not, but instead to restore us to what we were always meant to be.