Week 2 | It's Complicated (S1)

I’m guessing not a single person would disagree with the concept that life is complicated. From the questions we ask concerning our identity, to the search for our calling, to questions of faith, to navigating current affairs, politics, ideologies, finances, friendships, and more; our lives can be incredibly complicated.

The challenge is, we want a black and white world, a world where our choices are one of only two options. Wouldn’t that make life easier? And even then, we’d still love someone to tell us what to do. But if we’re honest, life is much more grey than black and white. It is nuanced, and this is true in our spiritual lives and our understanding of God as much as anything else. The apostle Paul reflected on our own personal struggle in his famous passage in Romans 7:

“15 I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. 19 I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.” (Romans 7:15, 19 NLT)

Over the next six weeks, we’re going to recognize how complicated life can be through the life and reflections of one of the most well-known figures in the history of the Jewish people, King David. As we do, we’ll look at stories from his life, while connecting those stories to some of the Psalms he would have written around the same time. We believe these connections will give us more of a 360 degree view of the complicated life that David lived, that can teach us much about our own.

In this series, we’ll touch on themes of mental health, questions of faith, spiritual disciplines, friendship, risk, and more as we address some of the nuances of our faith that lie in the grey areas of understanding ourselves, and God a little better. We’ll recognize that though life isn’t black and white, and there are always more than two sides to every story and person, God continues to meet us where we are right now with His grace. When we lean on and depend on that grace, it helps us grow more and more into the people God sees when he looks at us. But even with this growth, it’s important to recognize that we still have our scars, we still have our struggles and weaknesses, our good moments and our bad ones, and we will always need Jesus as we navigate the complicated nature of this life.