{"id":178,"date":"2012-04-16T16:46:03","date_gmt":"2012-04-16T21:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/?p=178"},"modified":"2012-04-16T16:46:03","modified_gmt":"2012-04-16T21:46:03","slug":"can-a-saint-sell-a-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/2012\/04\/16\/can-a-saint-sell-a-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Can a saint sell a house?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Yesterday at church the pastor told a story about some neighbors of his when he lived in another state.\u00a0 One family had their house up for sale, and another family gave them a little statue of a saint to bury in their backyard, saying that if they did so their house would sell faster.\u00a0 My pastor found out about it when he went over one day to say hi to the lady selling her house and she had the saint in a ziploc bag.\u00a0 She informed him that it didn’t work, which was why she had just dug it back up.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, wouldn’t it be nice if it had<\/em> worked and\u00a0all you had to do to sell your house was bury the statue of a saint in the backyard?<\/p>\n

But on the other hand, I am so very glad that it didn’t<\/em> work.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Well, think about it.\u00a0 If it did have the power to work, I think that there would be a lot more you’d need to know.\u00a0 Does it work best if you bury the statue right-side-up or upside-down?\u00a0 Or maybe he should lay down.\u00a0 Where<\/em>\u00a0 in your backyard would be the best place to bury it?\u00a0 What would happen if you buried it in the front yard?\u00a0 Would that make the house never sell?\u00a0 How would you find these things out?\u00a0 What if your dog had buried a bone in the backyard?\u00a0 Would that cancel out the effects of the statue of the saint?<\/p>\n

We can so easily buy into things that promise the “easy way out,” or a “quick fix.”\u00a0 Sometimes those things are valid, but often they lead us into bondage, always trying things and never quite making it work right.<\/p>\n

That kind of bondage is the way that millions of people around the world live.\u00a0 It is a major part of animism, a religious belief held widely around the world in which people believe that they have to appease and manipulate spirits to get anywhere.\u00a0 While Jesus came 2000 years ago to give us freedom from that kind of bondage\u00a0(John 8:36), there are still millions (if not billions) of people who have yet to hear that they no longer have to live in fear.\u00a0 Who is going to tell them that there’s a better way?<\/p>\n

“They even say that Papa God loves us.\u00a0 Is it even possible? – a god that loves me?” Nugara of the Bagwido tribe, Papua New Guinea<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday at church the pastor told a story about some neighbors of his when he lived in another state.\u00a0 One family had their house up for sale, and another family gave them a little statue of a saint to bury in their backyard, saying that if they did so their house would sell faster.\u00a0 My […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":945,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-178","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/945"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}