E03“Over Coming Ourselves in Adversity"

A haunting parable about a man who spent 38 years “on the mat” — and what that teaches us about inertia, self-pity, and the slow erosion of a life unlived. In this episode of Spiritual Hot Sauce, we unpack the Bethesda story (John 5:2–9) as a metaphor for entropy: how habits of comparison, excuse-making, and inaction quietly steal time, memories, and opportunity.

You’ll hear a fresh, non-dogmatic take on compassion, responsibility, and the power of small choices. Through story-driven reflection, we explore how reclaiming your time leads to richer relationships, more meaningful memories, and renewed purpose. 

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/share/17PxQSRsGN/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Follow on X https://x.com/spiritualhspod?s=21

Contact us at spiritualhotsauce@gmail.com

Episode 3 of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome, I'm Chris Jones. This is where believers and skeptics alike are invited to embark on a journey of faith, philosophy, and life from a different perspective. Whether we are joined by an insightful guest, or we just jump into the deep end, this exploration promises to challenge us all. Are we getting it right? This is Spiritual Hot Sauce.

UNKNOWN: 0:31

Spiritual Hot Sauce

SPEAKER_00: 0:38

So we've been talking about suffering. And when I say suffering, I mean it very generalized. It encompasses a lot. It's adversity. And adversity sorts us out whether we know it or not. That's how we choose to move forward or endure through storms of our lives. It's how we come out the other side. It defines us and defines how we impact the world around us. In our first episode, we talked about suffering and things that we can control. In the second episode, we talked about suffering and things we can't control. In this episode, I want to talk about behaviors we need to avoid that put us on the side of the road that takes us off our path, our journey. We talked about the concept of the compass. These behaviors may make the compass useless. So let's start with the compass. I want to kind of revisit that. In the first episode, we talked about suffering and things that we can control, and I introduced north and south. It represents our battle within. It's our duality. North is our emotions. Our emotions are our needs, our wants, our desires, our fears, and emotions want immediate gratification. Emotions don't understand long-term investment of our behaviors. Now, South, the other piece of our duality was discipline. And discipline, we said, was microdosing and suffering or doing hard things now so we can avoid the big hard things later that we don't want to deal with, that we don't always make it through. All of this comes from our will. It is how we choose to move forward. It is our essence. It is our center. So that represents North and South. Now, we said that there's a lot more to it than how I make it sound. I make it sound easy, but it gets very complicated. And we said that a good religion would serve us in how we choose to move forward with North and South. So you could say the compass North and South represents religion. In the second episode, we talked about suffering and things that we can't control. And we, or I, introduced the concept of East and West, that East represents the purpose to the suffering, that it has meaning, and that West represents no purpose at all, life just happens. We said this represents the spiritual aspect of the compass. So North and South is religion, East and West is spiritual, that you could be moving through hard times in your life in a South-East relationship. mindset, which means there's purpose of the suffering and you are disciplined as you go through it. Or you could be going through it in a northwest position, which means the suffering has no purpose at all and you are living in an emotional place at the time. But overall, we want to spend as long as periods as we can in the center of the compass. The life is a marathon and the beautiful things happens when we can spend as much time as we can in the center. So now I want to talk about behaviors we need to avoid at all costs that makes the compass useless because we're going nowhere. We're off our path altogether. There's this story that I think does a fantastic job in sharing this idea and this concept. And I spent some time in studying this, and I kind of got a different perspective. And as I got into it, it just took me to where I'm about to share. It's in John chapter 5, verses 2 through 9, for those who are interested where this comes from. But it's about the man from Bethesda. And if you don't know what Bethesda was, it was this watering hole. It was a pool, and there was five patios around it that was covered. And what it was was where the sheep would come through as they were taking a gate through the city, and they would take their sheep into the market. So they would let their sheep water there, drink, or clean them up before they took them in to sell them. This is a place where there was a legend that came around that a angel would come down occasionally and stir the waters and the first person to the waters would be healed. So what it did was is it created a place where all the disabled people would go to and hang out at. It's become this idea of a place of healing, which makes no sense to me because what I see it as is a place where society wanted their disabled people to move to and leave them alone, go hang out there. And I think it's I don't know where we'd get healing from, you know, the healing place, other than that local legend. I think it just was a place where they all came together. But we know from how I just described it, what it was used for, that it wasn't a very clean place. It was a place for watering and washing your sheep as you took them into the market. I think it historically speaks to, we have never done a great job in taking care of the less fortunate in our society. We need to do better. But there was a man in this story that had been there for 38 years. He put his mat down and he'd been there 38 years. Jesus makes a beeline for this guy. And when Jesus gets there, Jesus talks to him in a way that he doesn't speak to anybody else. Jesus always speaks with compassion and empathy and speaks in a way that is just encouraging as he heals people. This man, he spoke to differently. And as I kind of present more of the story and you get more the dynamics of what was going on, I think there's the lesson in it for us. Jesus says to this man when he gets to him, do you want to be healed? So he's giving him an option. I can walk away and not heal you, or I can heal you. Do you want to be healed? How the man responds is really weird. He doesn't even answer the question. He just starts making excuses as why he's there. I don't have anybody to take me to the pool when the waters are stirred. And he's just giving all these excuses of why he's there. Jesus doesn't acknowledge anything he says. Jesus just says, take up your mat and walk. He heals him. It's just very weird. Later on, the man finds Jesus and thanks him for healing him. And then Jesus says something to him that he doesn't say to anybody else in the Bible but one other person, which there's odd circumstances around as well. Jesus says to this person, go and sin no more. It's in that statement that took me to what I'm about to share with you, because I think that's what's revealing. It's a what if. I hypothesized, what if Jesus would have offered a third option to the man? So what he did offer him was, I cannot heal you or I can heal you. But what if Jesus says, or I can walk away and I could do nothing right now. You're going to spend the rest of the day right where you have on your mat, like you have every day for the last 38 years. Tonight, you're going to go to sleep like you always do. But tomorrow morning, you're going to wake up and it's going to be 38 years ago, the very day you put your mat down. I'm not going to heal you, but I am going to give you your 38 years back. What do you think the man would have chosen? Judging on their interactions, I think it gives us great insight. I mean, what if the man 38 years ago could have figured out a way to make a living? I mean, he's disabled, but what if he could have figured out a way to make a living? If he could have figured out a way to make a living, then he could have figured out a place to live. And if he could have figured out a place to live, he could have maybe found a wife. If he could have found a wife, he could have kids. 38 years later, we're talking grandkids. I mean, he could have figured out how to overcome his obstacles. and got on with life. He could have came back to Bethesda and helped other people, inspire them in a way that helps them get on with life. And those people that were so disabled that they couldn't, then he could go back and help them and get them to a better place. I recently had a conversation with someone. I was in a public place. I was in a retail setting, and a song came on. It was a really old song. And this person started humming. I said, I guess that's a blast from the past. And she said, yeah. She said, this carries a lot of memories for me, a lot of good memories for me. She said, this takes me back to high school. And I said, my first boyfriend. And we had some beautiful memories with this song playing that I just cherish. I love those memories since he's died and he's gone. But I have those memories. And I thought about that. And I thought about when we think we're making memories or we're trying to make memories, we really don't, do we? Memories happen when we're just living life and we're experiencing it and they just naturally happen. And then we carry them the rest of our lives. It just takes a few minutes to make these memories that are so precious to us. And I have this hope that, or this idea that is we're at the end of our lives and we're surrounded hopefully by people we love, that we're also surrounded by these memories that we've created that helps us pass on. And I realized this man had created no memories whatsoever. It's just 38 years of laying on a mat. Why is it that he put his mat down? Why is it that we put our mats down? Because sometimes we do. Fear, I guess. Fear's part of it. But with this man, I don't think of it as fear. I think this man felt sorry for himself. And feeling sorry for yourself is the first step in giving up in life. And I do want to say there's a big difference in feeling sorry for yourself in mourning. Mourning is a part of the process that we need. If we lose somebody, we mourn. If we lose our identity, we mourn. We lose a relationship, we mourn. It helps us get over it. It helps us get past it so we can move on with life. We need these mourning processes. Feeling sorry for yourself is not mourning. I've thought about that 38 years. There might be times in our life where we have to put down a mat and figure out life, you know. and mourn, rest, figure it out, take a moment, but then get on with life, move on, keep going. But 38 years of just laying there, that's entropy. What's entropy? Entropy is choosing not to deal with adversity. Entropy is slowly dying with a little or no pain. Let me say that again. Entropy is removing adversity. Entropy is just slowly dying with little or no pain. But there's no life there. No memory is being created. It comes from comparative judging, doesn't it? Comparative judging, they say, is the thief of all joy. I've saved more ways than one. I think it's, as we comparatively judge ourselves to other people, we always hyper fixate on what we don't have or what the hurdle is for us. And then we find other people that are exceptional at those things. Then we feel sorry for ourselves and we start to say things like it's not fair. But I think we also do it on the other extreme side. What do you mean by that? Well, this is what I mean. I mean, we even teach our children this, which is horrid. We need to quit. But we tell ourselves I'm doing better than such and such. We use the people at Bethesda as we walk past to feel better about who we are. I think what we need to do is maybe just find the median in life and then go look in the mirror and challenge ourselves. That's who we need to be dealing with. That's who we need to compare ourselves to, right? I think when we look at other people that are less fortunate and we use them to feel better about ourselves, we are now demeaning other people and elevating ourselves. That's a thief of joy too for the people of Bethesda. We need to eliminate that altogether and just look in the mirror and judge ourselves based on the median. And how are we doing? And we need to celebrate our wins. No matter how little or how big, we need to celebrate our wins. And we need to celebrate other people's wins around us, even strangers. I'm not saying nothing to do anything crazy, but just high-five them, congratulations and smile. And celebrate it with them. Create memories for them, right? As we create memories for ourselves. I think that's the sin Jesus was talking about when he told the man to go and sin no more. 38 years of not living life. 38 years of choosing entropy. I think that's the sin. As hard as life can be at times, man, what a gift. The gift is time. It is our most valuable resource whether we know it or not. And if we don't identify that, we don't get to the good stuff in life. Thanks for joining me here on Spiritual Hot Sauce. I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out with questions, comments and or concerns. And don't forget to like, subscribe and review us. You can follow us on Facebook for updates and information. And if you enjoy the flavor of the sauce, then please share it with others. I would appreciate that. We'll see you next time.