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| Hallelujah Night at Hanover Theatre on Friday, October 31, 2025 |
Pain is real.
Suffering is real.
But in Jesus' worldview,
despair is not the deepest reality ...
It's joy that underpins everything.
It's the deepest note that rings
through our lives, even in tragedy.
+ Brant Hansen,
Life Is Hard.
God Is Good.
Let's Dance.
Experiencing Real Joy
in a World Gone Mad
Is it a time to dance?
It might not feel like it right now. But during the dark hours of this past Friday, October 31 on All Hallows' Eve, I saw 2,300 people in the Hanover Theatre in the city of Worcester, across tradition, across culture, across ethnicity, dance to these words together:
" ... Every time I call Your name
Chains break, dry bones wake.
Every time I call Your name
The gates of Hell shake ... "
+ "I Know a Name"
I say I saw 2,300 people,
but I was also participating with them.
I was dancing.
I was singing.
I was daring to hope that
the gates of Hell could shake,
could quake in a city that often feeds on
cynicism, skepticism, and criticism.
I say this because I'm a citizen
of Worcester and I too often
feed on all these things.
But I want more.
And while hope is often described as "a dangerous thing," somewhere deep inside us, we still dare to believe that "hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."
I'm trying to hope for a lot of things right now, for me, for my family, for Emmaus City Church, for my neighbors, for Worcester (especially when I see what God is doing in Atlanta among 40,000+ people with ACCESS and 2819, or in Jesus' Church in China where humble and holy people say, “No suffering, no glory—that’s the most important spiritual DNA of the Chinese house church movement ... we are willing to pay the price to bear the cost of discipleship.”). Yet, as I seek to be a hope dealer in the beloved city I get to call home, sometimes I find that my joy is lacking, my energy zapped, my heart heavy. And that's why I felt like God was inviting me to listen to words from a fellow misfit again this week.
One of my favorite books I have read during the past decade is Blessed Are the Misfits: Great News for Believers Who Are Introverts, Spiritual Strugglers, or Just Feel Like They're Missing Something by Brant Hansen. I love the title of that book (proving that sometimes lengthy can actually be a good thing). And I love the words written inside this book even more, written by someone who describes himself like this:
I'm not adept socially.
I'm on the autism spectrum.
I'm from a broken family ...
By nature, I'm a bitter pessimist.
A glass-half-empty guy.
A fatalist.
A very anxious person ...
I've always felt like a misfit.
And yet, Brant shares that:
Even as someone prone to
great skepticism,
I am gaining faith
when so many other people
in our culture seem to be losing it.
These words are featured in Brant's most recent book with another good lengthy title, Life Is Hard. God Is Good. Let's Dance.: Experiencing Real Joy in a World Gone Mad. Publisher's Weekly describes it as "Quirky and inviting essays on what it means to live joyfully in a world full of 'anger and anxiety'... This optimism booster has a light touch and a lasting impact."
The rest of this post below features one of Brant's quirky and inviting essays that has stuck with me. In fact, these stories of girls and boys being healed to run and dance came to mind again when I was worshiping with others during this past hallowed night and saw a little bit of heaven break into Worcester.
I dare to hope that we will get to see a little more of heaven in our city in the days to come. And when we do, I hope to respond with joy and a little more dancing.
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| Joyful Sisterhood by Motiontography |
A CURE for Joy & Dancing
There are millions of kids around the world who have disabilities that could be fixed with surgery ... but they don't get fixed. So a married couple who are Jesus followers, one a nurse and the other an orthopedic surgeon, thought, Well ... why don't we fix them? Jesus told us to proclaim the Kingdom and heal the sick. Shouldn't that be what we're known for? CURE grew into a network of permanent surgical hospitals serving the poorest of the poor, children who would never get access to surgeries otherwise ...
A few weeks ago, the sun was setting in Lusaka, Zambia, and I stood with some friends near a playground. There were two little girls giggling and hopping along, their moms watching nearby. We started talking to the moms and eventually playing with the little girls. They were new friends. Both were five years old, and both had severely deformed legs, with their feet turned inward and slightly upside down, from untreated clubfoot.
There's a thing I love to do when visiting CURE hospitals: I love to twirl the kids. They line up for it. I grab their wrists, and we spin and spin until I can't stand up anymore. It's a gigglfest! (Excuse me — Microsoft Word is now giving me the red squiggly line telling me gigglefest isn't a word. How am I supposed to write a serious theological work about global health care and CURE without gigglefest? I'm using it anyway.) Anyway, back to this gigglefest ... Before the sun went down it was Elizabethe who wanted to be twirled over and over. What a sweetheart.
She struggled to walk
but played so hard.
Twirl a giggling kid a long time, and you learn: (1) it's never enough for them and you'll have to tap out from dizziness, and (2) you'll probably remember the kid. I remember Elizabeth.
CURE gives access to surgeries these kids might never have otherwise. Parents sometimes give up hope that their kids can ever be healed, only to find out about a CURE hospital, sometimes hundreds of miles away, that will do the surgery and charge exactly $0.00. So these hospitals are busy and special places.
I consider them
embassies of
the Kingdom heaven.
When I visit one of these hospitals, I usually sit in to observe a surgery or two. In Zambia, they do ten to fifteen surgeries each day. Later in my weeklong stay, I came in midafternoon and observed Dr. Moyo preparing as the techs readied the now sleeping little patient. I could see only two feet sticking out from beneath the sheet. I asked him the child's name and for a little background. "It's a girl. This is the first of two surgeries for this patient. Her name is ... " He checked. "Elizabeth" ... When Dr. Moyo and the nurses started praying over her, I got emotional. Her life was about to change drastically.
Dr. Moyo paused before the surgery
and told me what Elizabeth's life
would have been like
if she hadn't been taken to CURE.
"She would always be pushed aside.
Her disability would
forever be her identity.
She would always be
considered a curse," he said.
"She would be everybody's victim."
Everybody's victim?
This little girl?
Not happening.
Not now.
This kid is going to
be able to run and
play and
dance.
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| Joyful Sisterhood by Motiontography |
I once met a little girl in Kenya named Ellen who got similar treatment. Her mom couldn't stop smiling, because it wasn't long before Ellen was a complete blur on the soccer field, even at age six. I saw her in action, running circles around boys several years older than her. Even they were laughing at the pure speed of the kid.
No one runs with more
unbridled, glorious vivacity
than a little kid
who's been only sitting and
watching her whole life.
So much of what we see in the news is about destroying the young: abuse and murders and wars and mass shootings. When horrible things happen, some folks respond with a question for those of us who somehow still believe in a good, all-powerful God: "Where's your God now?" It's a fair question. But I have a fair answer because God is still at work in the world. Where's my God now? Go with me to one of these hospitals. I'll show you.
"This is a place where
God walks the earth,"
one lady said.
She was smiling. It was at the CURE hospital in Ethiopia, and she was saying it because her life was suddenly changing and a burden was lifted, literally, off her back. She was the mom to a boy named Andualem, and while her husband had abandoned her after seeing little Andualem's crooked legs, she wasn't going to give him up. When it came time for him to start his schooling and he couldn't walk with her, she carried him. She put him on her back and walked more than a mile along a dusty road to take him to school.
Every day, there and back, she carried him. She did it for first grade, and then for second grade. Even as he grew bigger and bigger she carried him. He held her around her shoulders and neck. Fourth grade. Fifth grade. Sixth grade. He grew and grew, and she kept carrying him. Moms are forces of nature.
One day, a truck driver who'd seen her on multiple occasions stopped along the road to talk with her. He mentioned a place where he thought she might be able to find healing for her son. He'd heard of CURE in Addis Ababa. When she got to the hospital, Andualem's mom showed the staff the scars on her back from carrying her son for so long. And she cried.
She found people who cared, and healing for her son. A dream come true. And that's when she said what she said, about it being a place where God walks the earth, and I can tell you she's right about that. It's not that the people working in the hospital aren't highly flawed. Of course they are. But that's just it:
When humans,
such as we all are,
want God's Kingdom on earth
as it is in heaven —
when we really catch a vision for it
— the reaction from desperate people
is "Surely, God is here!"
They know it.
God can use any of us.
God has an MO, a style,
which He uses all the time:
He uses the humble.
He uses the little things,
the seemingly unimpressive,
overlooked things
to do the marvelous.
He enjoys it.
+ pgs. 15, 44-47, 97
adapted excerpts from
"A Place Where God Walks the Earth" in
Life Is Hard. God Is Good.
Let's Dance.
Joy is not
a passing sensation of pleasure,
but a pervasive sense
of well-being.
+ Dallas Willard
Joy is an act of resistance
against all the forces of despair:
violence, war, debt, death ...
all of the things that can cause us
to think life in this world is not worth living.
against all the forces of despair:
violence, war, debt, death ...
all of the things that can cause us
to think life in this world is not worth living.
+ Willie James Jennings
Bonus Posts on Joy:
With anticipation and joy,
Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan |
