Ethos | Renewal | Jeremiah 29:1-14 | Week 6

If you're new with us, we're in a seven-week series called "Ethos."  We're looking at the values, dreams, and hopes we have together as a community of faith, as we seek to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  This week we're talking about renewal, next week we're going to be talking about roots, the last in our series.

A few weeks back, my wife took our two boys to a mother-son event, so I got the chance to take my daughter out for a little daddy-daughter date.  We went out to dinner together and came back to the house to watch a movie of her choice.  She picked the newer "Beauty and the Beast."  We were having a great time watching it together.  About three-quarters of the way through the movie, the boys and Kelly came back home so we stopped the movie and everybody went to bed.  We stopped it at this very tension-filled moment, where the Beast had told Belle that she was allowed to go and help her father.  He released her from the captivity she was in.  So, you have Belle, who's free, then the Beast, who it seems like, is going to keep on living as the Beast for the rest of his existence.  I thought, what a terrible story that would have been if that's where the movie ended.  If the movie ended with Belle being freed and she's happy to go and do what she gets to do and back to her normal life, and the Beast is still the beast.  There's something in us that wants the Beast to be redeemed, isn't there?  There's a reason the movie doesn't end in that place...