Tag: I Can Only Imagine Movie

Why do we push people away who try to help us?

In the movie I Can Only Imagine Bart Millard pushes away his high school girlfriend Shannon when she tries to help him when she sees he’s hurting. His knee jerk reaction is to push her away.

Our natural reaction when someone tries to help us when we’re hurting is to push back, because it hurts when you poke a wound. But we have to find the root cause of the pain if we want to heal and sometimes that means a painful conversation to find that root.

When the human body is severely burned you have to remove the dead tissue to get to the healthy tissue so that it can grow and heal, which is an extremely painful experience but the end result is healed healthy tissue. 

The same is true with our emotional wounds we have to remove the things in our life that are dead in order to allow new growth.

That may mean removing certain people from our life or removing ourselves from circumstances that continue to hurt us.

But it also means we have to let those that are trying to help us heal, to help. Trust the people that have been there and are ahead of you and lean on their experience to guide you through the healing process. And yes sometimes the the severest wounds scar but they don’t hurt anymore. Those scars can then be a testament to how God healed us.

Why do we think we don’t belong in church?

In the movie I Can Only Imagine Bart Millard invites his dad to go to church with him and his dad replies that “he doesn’t belong in church.”

This broke my heart and began to make me think how often this is our reason for not inviting people to church or that we’ve given ourselves.

But this is a misconception. The church is not four walls or an organization, the people are the church. Jesus destroyed the temple and rebuilt it in us. We are the temple. Jesus is inside us.

Saying that we don’t belong in church is true. We don’t deserve to have Jesus live inside us, none of us do. But that is the beauty of his sacrifice we don’t deserve it but he gives us the free gift of having him live inside us, not by earning it but by Jesus sacrifice for us he makes the way for us to be the church.

This means that when we encounter people we are bringing the church to them.

The next time you meet someone and think “I want to bring them to church.” Remember you already have. You’re right there in front of them (you are the church), tell them what Jesus has done for you and ask them if they would like him to do the same for them.

Church is anywhere we are, we don’t have to wait for Sunday or the right service. Jesus is in us all day every day and he wants all his children to know him.

Once you have introduced them to Jesus, then invite them to the gathering of other Christians.

~May all your interactions with others reflect Jesus

God Answers Prayers

A movie recently came out about Bart Millard of Mercy Me’s life called I Can Only Imagine. Bart’s dad was horrible to him as he was growing up and he left as soon as he graduated high school, to pursue his career in Christian music but just before his band made it big, he went home to patch things up with his dad and God answered both their prayers. Bart returned home which was his fathers prayer and his father had accepted Jesus and he finally had the dad he always wanted. 

God answers our prayers  but sometimes the timeline doesn’t always happen when we think it should.

My mom raised me as a christian but I decided to abandon God for 6 years in my early twenties and live life the way I wanted.

This broke my moms heart. She prayed years for me to return to my faith in God. She watched for years as I made stupid, selfish choices all in the name of finding what I thought would make me happy.

But what I found instead was disappointment and a constant longing to feel loved, accepted, valued and wanted.

By worldly standards I had what appeared to be a good life on the outside, a good job with consistent promotions and a long term relationship. But in reality I had a job that pulled me away from friends and family and an emotionally abuse dependent relationship.

I was miserable trying to find happiness on my own.

Eventually I hit rock bottom and decided to give my life back to God.

Keep praying for your family and friends, continue to love and support them and always keep the door open for them. You never know when they will make the decision to change their life.

Photo by Samuel Martins on Unsplash

 

Hope in darkness

We can find hope in some of the worst circumstances, if we look for it.

Jesus is that hope. He can do anything, no matter how impossible we think a situation is.

Bart Millard of Mercy Me shares his story in the the movie I Can Only Imagine. His inspiration for the song that inspired the movie was his dad. Bart never believed his dad could change. But to his surprise, when he was at a low point, when his band looked like they had lost their chance at success, Bart went home to repair his relationship with his dad and found a changed man when he arrived. The one person he thought could never changed and had come to believe in Jesus and become the father he had always hoped for.

God is always full of surprises and when we place our hope in him he does more then we can ever hope or imagine, even in the bleakest circumstances.