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Sunday Reflection

This morning, we began a new journey together — a series called Bearing One Another’s Burdens: Healing Together in Christ.

It’s about learning to see, listen, and walk with one another through the pain that too often stays hidden. Before we can help someone carry their burden, we must first learn to see them as God sees them.

The God Who Sees

In Genesis 16:7–13, Hagar gives God a new name — El Roi, “the God who sees me.”

She was a woman used, discarded, and fleeing in trauma. Yet, God met her in the wilderness — not at the temple, not in prosperity, but in the desert of her pain.

When Hagar says, “I have seen the One who sees me,” she bears witness to a God who does not look away from suffering but enters it.

This is the heart of the gospel.

Jesus, the Word made flesh, did not remain distant. He saw the leper, the widow, the outcast, the possessed — and touched them. The Incarnation is the ultimate act of divine empathy. God became one of us so that we might know that no pain is invisible to heaven.

The Science That Confirms the Story

Modern research has begun catching up to what Scripture has long proclaimed — trauma leaves deep imprints on body and soul, and love heals them.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, first conducted by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, revealed that early trauma — abuse, neglect, or exposure to dysfunction — has lifelong effects.

Adults with four or more ACEs are at significantly higher risk of depression, substance abuse, chronic illness, and even premature death.

Subsequent studies (such as those published in BMC Public Health and Frontiers in Psychiatry) continue to affirm this link: trauma shapes our biology, rewires stress responses, and isolates us from others.

But the research also shows something profoundly hopeful: healing relationships can change the brain. Community, compassion, and consistent care literally rewire neural pathways damaged by trauma.

It seems that science is echoing what Scripture declared long ago:

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” — Galatians 6:2

The Theology of Healing Together

From Genesis to Revelation, healing is always communal.

When God formed the church, He created a body, not a collection of isolated believers. The wounds of one affect all, and the healing of one strengthens the whole.

In Adventist theology, this connects beautifully with Christ’s ministry in the heavenly sanctuary — a ministry of intercession, cleansing, and restoration. We are called to mirror that ministry here on earth. The sanctuary is not only a doctrine of atonement; it’s a vision of relational healing. In Christ, heaven’s work of restoration becomes ours.

James writes,

“Confess your faults one to another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” — James 5:16

Healing doesn’t begin in a therapist’s office or at the altar call alone — it begins in relationships where honesty and prayer meet compassion and grace. The church, filled with the Holy Spirit, becomes a living sanctuary of restoration.

A Church That Sees

Our heartbeat reminds us who we are becoming:

“We are a Holy Spirit-filled church family, where every member engages deeply, serves faithfully, and reaches our community for Christ.”

To engage deeply means more than serving on a committee or attending a service. It means seeing the unseen — in our pews, our homes, our neighborhoods. It means believing that God still meets people in the desert, and that sometimes He uses us to do it.

When we learn to see others as God sees them — not as their wounds, but as beloved, capable of healing — we begin to live out the gospel with our eyes wide open.

Blessings in Jesus’ Name,

Tom Nicholas, Pastor

We are a Holy Spirit-filled church family, where every member engages deeply, serves faithfully, and reaches our community for Christ.