“We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  What a remarkable testimony from Paul.  He was certainly no stranger to suffering.  He had been arrested more times than he could count.  Beaten to within an inch of his life on several occasions.  Paul gave up a life of prestige so he could be a missionary for Jesus, and he suffered as a result.  But instead of letting that suffering discourage him, Paul’s suffering was a source of ENCOURAGEMENT!  He boasted in his sufferings, because he could see that even in his suffering, God was pouring good things into his life.Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Have you ever thought of hardship as a pathway to hope?  It reminds me of something my dad used to say when my sister and I complained about life being hard:  It will put hair on your chest! Several years ago I attended a leadership seminar, and the opening speaker showed us this diagram.  It’s a challenge meter, like a thermometer.  He asked us to make a mark to show how we were feeling these days—were we seriously underchallenged, at the bottom of the scale?  Were we feeling completely overwhelmed and in over our heads, dangerously overchallenged at the top of the scale?  Or were we somewhere in the middle?  Maybe we were feeling appropriately challenged.  He encouraged us to take a quick snapshot of our lives, and make a mark on the meter according to how challenged we are these days. Then he asked us, where do you think people do their best work?  We all knew instinctively that no one does their best work when they are underchallenged—it’s boring down there!  And no one does their best work when they are way overchallenged—it’s scary up there!  I assumed we do our best work right in the middle, because that’s where I prefer to spend most of my time!  But the presenter drew a mark slightly above the line between appropriately and over challenged.  He said, this is where we do our best work.  Where it feels a little too hard.  Just outside our comfort zone.  Not so challenging that we are in danger of burning out or falling apart.  But more challenged than we would say feels “just right”.We do our best work when things are a little too hard for us.  Consider the pandemic.  It’s an example of a greater challenge than we would ever choose for ourselves.  Yet the sudden lockdown last year has spurned a wave of innovation and creativity in our society that is going to bless us for decades to come.  But it’s a fine line!  There’s a sweet spot where being overchallenged produces great results, but go just a little above it, and it quickly becomes a danger zone.  We are seeing evidence that the pandemic has brought many of us into the dangerously overchallenged zone, and up here we need to be very careful to take extraordinarily good care of ourselves.  We were not built to live our whole lives in the dangerously overchallenged zone!Now let’s think about the paralyzed man in our gospel lesson today.  Without the help of his friends, he is hopeless.  The paralyzed man is totally dependent on others to keep him alive.  I don’t know anyone who would want to be in that situation!  Most of us find it hard to ask for help once in a while.  Can you imagine needing help for just about everything?Thankfully, the paralyzed man has friends who want to help, and who know a little something about perseverance.  I’m sure it wasn’t their initial plan to have to climb up on the roof and lower their friend down.  When they arrived and saw how crowded the place was, they might have been tempted to just turn around and go home.  If someone asked them, where would you put yourselves on the challenge meter, they probably would have said, this feels a little too hard!  But working together, they literally and figuratively rose to the challenge!  I bet that experience put some hair on their chest!Challenges are a part of life.  Our faith does not take away our challenges, but rather gives us a new way to look at them.  When Jesus healed the paralyzed man, he did not wave a magic wand and suddenly make life easy.  He healed him in a way that gave him the strength to meet his challenges.  In healing the man, Jesus could have said, ‘You poor thing! You have suffered so much!  Someone, carry this man’s mat for him.  Help him get home.”  No.  Jesus said, “Stand up, take your bed, and return to your home.”  Jesus healed the man so he could do for himself.  So he could carry his own weight for the first time since he became paralyzed.  Jesus offered him a freedom no one else could: he forgave his sins, he healed his paralysis, and he immediately believed in the man’s ability to be self-sufficient.  Those are three truly beautiful gifts, each one as important as the other.Last week we talked about candor, how it takes courage and finesse to tell the right truth, to the right person, at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reason.  Candor is a very difficult quality to carry out!  Being honest in a direct and considerate way requires really thinking things through.  The same is true when it comes to helping others.  A certain amount of suffering is good for us!  It produces endurance and character and ultimately hope.  But at the same time, we are called to join with Christ’s work in alleviating suffering!  We are called to be like those trouble-shooting friends, and rise to the challenge of helping those who are truly in need.  But how can we be sure we are helping people in ways that in the end are truly freeing?  How can we help in ways that strengthen people’s ability to be self-sufficient?This question is on my mind a lot.  Just last Sunday a man stopped by the church asking for gas money.  He told me the exact same hard luck story he told me a few months ago when he stopped by on a Sunday morning.  Last time I gave him a Wawa gift card for his gas, but I didn’t have any of them on hand this time.  Several options came to mind.  Should I give him money from my wallet to buy gas?  Send someone to go with him to the gas station and fill up his tank with my credit card?  Ask him to come back during the week when I had time to really talk to him?  How can I help in a way that frees him from continually needing help?I don’t have that all figured out, that’s for sure.  But today I would like to tell you about two projects that Lima is supporting that are working hard on those kinds of questions.  The first is a group called Help Build Hope.  They run a mission program that partners with local churches and other organizations to build walls for Habitat for Humanity.  You are probably familiar with Habitat for Humanity.  Their philosophy is, a decent home provides the strength, stability and independence that families need, and Habitat for Humanity’s vision is a world where everyone has a decent place to live. But they don’t just hand out homes.  Instead, Habitat for Humanity takes home ownership out of the dangerously overchallenged zone, and puts it into the slightly above comfortable zone!  Habitat homeowners have to put in a lot of sweat equity, which means learning new skills and working hard.  They have to take finance classes, which means being vulnerable and talking about the hard subject of money.  I know most of us would say that is above our preferred level of challenge!  And they have will have to generate income so they can afford their mortgage payment.  Habitat for Humanity provides healing on three levels.  It frees people from housing insecurity.  It frees them from an oppressive mortgage payment.  And it frees them to see realize their own potential for self-sufficiency.  Hopefully the Habitat for Humanity clients will never need charity again.  I think Habitat is an organization that echoes our gospel lesson today.Help Built Hope is a partner organization, that goes around to local churches and other organizations and helps them, in one weekend, build all the walls for a particular Habitat for Humanity house.  We will be hosting a Help Build Hope weekend in our parking lot from September 24-26.  On Friday, the Help Build Hope trucks will arrive, and a dozen or so volunteers will be needed to cut all the lumber.  On Saturday, fifty or so volunteers will be needed to turn those pieces of lumber into framed walls.  After lunch, we will stand the walls up according to the house’s floorplan, so we can see what the house is going to look like.  On Sunday, we will have a worship service, pray over the walls, sign them with Bible verses and prayers and blessings, and then they will be loaded onto a trailer and taken to the actual build site.When I heard about Help Build Hope, I immediately knew, this is a project that is slightly too hard for us!  We’ve had people go on mission trips and use construction skills every summer for quite a while. But I can’t name fifty people in our church that want to spend a day driving nails!  This will require us getting to know our neighbors, and recruiting a good bit of help from beyond our congregation.  It will mean being vulnerable and trying new things.  But it will also pay off giant dividends.  Can you imagine how good we are going to feel when we wave good-bye to that trailer with all the walls to a house on it, knowing we got to be like the Bible story men who climbed on the roof to help their paralyzed friend get well?  Our Help Build Hope weekend is going to be equally life changing.The second mission I want to tell you about is called Zoe Empowers.  They started with a desire to help children who were orphaned by AIDS.  They were quickly inspired by a Rwandan social worker who had developed a model of helping that empowered the young people to become self-sufficient instead of being dependent on hand-outs.  Zoe Empowers brings the oldest child in a family of orphaned or vulnerable siblings into a group that meets for three years to address eight important life areas, including food security, housing, education, income generation, child rights, spiritual support, and health and hygiene.  Their motto is, “From beggar to boss in three years.”  Their goal is to have the young people in their program become self-sufficient so they never need charity again.  They help children who are stuck in a dangerously over-challenged situation, and give them enough support so they can flourish.  That means giving them only enough support to bring them into this slightly over-challenged zone.  The transformation that occurs in these three years is a multi-faceted miracle, offering freedom from poverty, the opportunity to meet Christ, and the knowledge that they have within them the power to create a better life.We will be talking much more about Help Build Hope and Zoe Empowers in the weeks ahead.  But for now, let me just say:  it takes courage to trust that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint, because hope is a gift from the Holy Spirit.   But this courage is contagious!  When I called Zoe Empowers and told them we would like to get involved, we were quickly matched with a group that is forming in Rwanda this summer.  The Zoe Empowers employee told me, “When the young people hear about your support, they will be so encouraged by your belief in them.  That’s what matters most to them.  That you believe they can do it, that they can be empowered to be self-reliant.”  That blew my mind.  I assumed what would matter most was our money.  But what matters most is our COURAGE and ENCOURAGEMENT.  The pastor who runs Help Build Hope said something similar when I booked our build weekend with him.  It takes courage to trust that hardship and suffering are gateways to endurance, character, and hope.  It takes courage to trust that, if we can lower the burden on people who are in this dangerously challenged area, and turn up the heat a little on the people who are only appropriately challenged, that is where the best things happen.  Right there in the sweet spot might be just where God wants us.Christ calls us to a life of courage so we can join in the work of bringing good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom to the oppressed.  As we seek to obey Christ and alleviate suffering, may we have the courage, hope, and creativity to do so in ways that guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride, in ways that lead to justice and liberty for all.  Amen.