2020-05-21 Coffee with Pirate Chris - Identifying with the healing

The speaker shares a personal story about wearing an eye patch as a child to strengthen their weak eye. They reflect on how this experience relates to the transformation that occurs when someone becomes a Christian. They discuss how certain things that make us look different or feel like victims can become idols, and emphasize the importance of finding identity in Christ instead of our past hurts. The speaker also mentions their own healing journey with their eyes and how it serves as a reminder of God's miracles. Good morning and welcome to Coffee with Pirate Chris! Just kidding, but when I was a kid I used to wear an eye patch for four hours a day with my glasses on to train my weaker eye to grow in strength. I have in for those who don't know my glasses one of these lenses is very thick the other is quite thin because one of my eyes is quite a bit stronger than the other they call it a lazy eye where my brain was using only mostly the one eye not the other and this actually skews your 3d perspective. In fact when uh when I was young I still remember when I was probably like nine or ten when I first got my glasses and started doing the whole eye patch thing I remember the day I looked at the clouds and wore the top clouds are 3d I never noticed this before I could never tell the clouds had three dimensions they everything just looked flat to me I had very little depth perception and I've always remembered that as a great analogy for the fact that um you know how when before our life in Christ thing we see the world in a certain way and it seems normal to us it seems that that's all that there is but then uh when we when we have our life of Christ we see this whole new dimension in everything and life and the world just seems totally different to us that's not even what I was going to talk about today that's a bonus for you there you go you're welcome what I was going to talk to you about today though was that wearing an eye patch was a very visible uh identifier that made me seem different and so consequently uh you know I always make sure I did my four hours of eye patch wearing that the eye doctor had recommended at home I don't want other people to see me like this but they think I might look weird or something like that right they might make fun of me or something like that but the funny thing is that in life there are certain things like this that maybe make us look different that we uh you know we shy away from letting other people see then there's other times that the hurts and pains in our life give us almost like a victim status right and and sometimes we use that to our advantage we use that to to gain sympathy and acceptance maybe we've been hurt before and so we don't feel accepted and so we create we because of our hurts we started to identify so strongly with our hurts that we create those things into idols you know um as a staff at the church there's a book we've been reading through as a devotional and one thing that I really appreciate uh that I pointed out was that uh you know we think of modern idols as anything that distracts us from God but you know one other key thing about idols and in olden times were the people created them themselves you know it's that distraction that we created uh on our own and sometimes we create these identities for ourselves out of our hurts and we don't want to let them go because we feel like it makes us accepted you know in my own life I've had that too where there's been hurts and things that have happened in my life and I've identified so strongly with those pivotal moments in my life and they were pivotal but why are they the reason they were pivotal and changing was not because of the hurt it's because of what God did through the hurt and where God led me through the hurt you know and he is often reminding me that my story is not the story of the hurt but the story of the freedom and success in the spirit that he has given me through it all and that is where my identity should lie in Christ in what Christ has done for me not in what others have done to me or not to what I have done to myself or not to how I feel about those hurts holding on to that bitterness like an old friend but instead holding on to Jesus and everything that he has done for me so that I don't have to hang on to an identity of something that was a hurt but instead an identity of healing you know God did a major healing on my eyes my eyes are not perfect and I'm still praying for them to get better and better and doing the things that I need to do to help them get better but the fact I can see in three dimensions now when I was a kid and I had almost zero depth perception is nothing short of a miracle as far as I'm concerned and that's the identity that I have the identity of the healing not the identity of the hurt God bless