Spiritual Forensics-God’s Way! …Hello Hump Day readers. Here we are, mid-August already and I have to be honest, I am craving for some of my TV shows again. Since I was a paramedic (years way back in my younger days) I gravitated to the crime shows, the police procedures, the fire-fighters, some of the hospital shows—as long as it is about medicine and not who’s dating who! And I admit I was elated when they brought the original CSI back!

One of the latest CSI True from Miami was one last week and it got my attention quickly. A young girl had been killed and thrown into the ocean. The investigators turned everything over to forensic scientists and wow—just by examining sand on the soles of a possible suspect’s shoes who stood in the sand way too long, they now had a suspect and a probable time-line of the murder. Not only that, they looked at a lot of sand, coarse and fine, and the variety of colors of sand and also sea shells which come into the forensics realm, and in one shell they found a torn fingernail whose DNA matched the possible murderer. Because of their forensic work, they were able to find the perpetrator and solve a terrible crime.

The word ‘forensic’ is not just about solving crimes, though. Webster’s Dictionary describes this word in its totality: “The noun ‘forensic’ means “an argumentative exercise” and derives from the adjective forensic, whose earliest meaning in English is “belonging to, used in, or suitable to courts or to public discussion and debate.” 

I bet you would have never looked at forensics like this before, right? Forensics is more than we realize. To sum it up, it is a type of exercise—a practice to work on until we get it right. So, I thought that maybe we should use forensics in our spiritual lives as well!

In Matthew 7:26-27 [Message], Jesus says: “But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.”

This Scripture immediately reminded me of the suspect’s shoes who not only walked on the sand but stood on the sand to do his crime. He left his foot-prints thinking that it didn’t matter—but it did!

Have you ever been on the beach and tried to stand in the sand? We have; just yesterday we took Moose down to the Chama River and we all got sucked into the sand! It doesn’t last long—your shoes are filled with sand and you start to sink and the river keeps coming with more sand and more water. You get sucked in and it is hard to go forward and get out of the muck. Forensics would tell you to not “argue with the sand” and get moving because the only way you could stay upright was to keep moving!

All this forensic stuff made me think of my faith-walk with Jesus. Am I moving forward or am I sinking? The argumentative exercise of forensics fits right into my spiritual life when I say ‘Lord I will go to church-read my Bible-memorize Scripture’, but my mind gets into an argument with my spiritual self and I wind up asking Jesus to forgive me because what I said I would do I did not do! The forensics would be spot-on cause I’m sinking in soft sand.

What a “moving” picture this is about our faith walk with Jesus! It’s so easy to sink when we’re not progressing forward because we are getting sucked into the vortex of our noisy chaotic society. There is so much that captures us and we follow those trends. At the end of the day we can look back and realize we really didn’t do anything that was helpful for us or anyone else on this day—ouch!

The forensic crime story and the sinking sand image just sticks with me. I was glad that the crime was solved but I also realized my own ‘sinking-walk’ and how I can use the goodness of spiritual forensics to keep me going—putting one foot in front of another walking steadily with Jesus no matter what ground I’m on. How about you? AMEN.