Last week we sat with the wound that happens inside God's house.

This week, we ask the final question of Series 1.

How does the healing actually begin?

Not as a programme. Not as a method. As a way of seeing — enabled by the Spirit, modelled by the Son, flowing from the Father.

Episode 10 traces the full arc. The enemy's strategy behind the father wound. The Holy Spirit as the Spirit of adoption, the one who enables the cry that reaches Abba. The Philippians 2 progression, what love actually looks like when it moves through a person who has died to self. The father in Luke 15 performing kenosis before Paul wrote it. And the woman caught in adultery — and what it means that the sinless man chose the dirt over the stone.

We also look at something embedded in one of the oldest books in the Torah — a structure that suggests the design was never new.

Vertical first. Then horizontal. Always.

And the episode closes with something personal. A moment in an ordinary Accra market at 6 am. And what it changed about how one man sees the person beside him.

The comfort was never meant to stay with you.

But this is not where the story ends.

Series 1 asked: Who is God?

Series 2 is going to take us somewhere deeper.

The seed has been planted. Watch what grows.

Last week we asked why so many of us struggle to feel a running God running toward us. This week we have to ask the harder question.

What happens when the place that was supposed to heal us — wounds us instead?

Church hurt is real. It travels in every direction — from leadership to congregation, between members, and sometimes from congregation back to leadership. This episode doesn't look away from any of it.

But it also follows three men who faced that wound and made a remarkable choice.

Joseph — thrown into a pit by his own brothers — who looked at the people who betrayed him and said: "You meant it for evil. But God meant it for good."

David — who built 400 broken men into warriors, only to have those same men threaten to stone him at his lowest moment. And who strengthened himself in God and led them anyway.

Paul — who stood alone at his first defence, abandoned by everyone he had built — and wrote: "May it not be held against them."

Three wounds. Three men. One choice.

And one text that ties it all together — 2 Corinthians 1:3-4. The God of all comfort, who comforts us in our troubles — so that we can comfort others with the same comfort we received.

The comfort was never meant to stay with you.

Abba's Balm is about finding your way back to the table — even after the table wounded you.

Episode 7 showed us a Father who runs. But for many of us, that image doesn't quite land — because something older, something quieter, gets in the way.

In this episode, we follow two men whose stories tell the truth about that something.

Ishmael — the firstborn son sent into the wilderness with a skin of water and no way back. And Mephibosheth — the forgotten grandson of a fallen king, hiding in a place called Lo-debar, which means no pasture. A place of nothing.

One was heard in the wilderness. The other was called to a table he never expected.

Both of them carry a question this episode refuses to avoid: what does the father wound actually do to us — and what does God say about it?

We also explore the Aaronic Blessing from Numbers 6 — and what it looks like when you read it in the original Hebrew. The God it describes is not distant. Not conditional. Not waiting to see if you earn it.

And to every father listening — and every man still waiting to become one — this episode has something to say to you too.

Abba hears the child. He always has.

He had been the life of the room not long ago. Friends everywhere. Laughter at every table. Wherever he went, the good times followed. He was generous. He had money, and he spent it freely.

And then the money ran out. And the room emptied. Not one phone call. Not one check-in. Not one person standing with him.

In that silence — sitting in a field feeding pigs, far from everything he had known — a thought broke through for the first time in a long time.

My father's servants eat better than this.

Episode 7 of ABA The Seed follows the most detailed parable Jesus ever told. And before we get to the story, we need to understand who Jesus is telling it to — because the audience changes everything.

He is eating with tax collectors and sinners. The religious leaders are muttering outside. And Jesus responds with a story about a father and two sons that dismantles everything they thought they knew about how God relates to the unworthy.

A younger son who insults his father and demands his inheritance early. A father who gives it anyway. A far country. A famine. A field of pigs. And then — a son who comes to himself.

And a father who was watching the road.

Who sees him while he is still far off.

Who runs.

Who restores before the performance is complete.

Who goes out — twice — toward two different sons in two different kinds of lostness.

We have spent six episodes watching a God who moves toward humanity. Episode 7 is Jesus showing us what that movement looks like with a human face.

The theology was never abstract. It was always this personal.

This is ABA The Seed — a podcast for everyone who was told their questions were too dangerous.

My name is Aaron. And we are still growing. 🌱

There is a Hebrew word at the centre of this episode that most people raised in church have been taught incorrectly.

The word is Kavod. It is translated "glory." But its root meaning is not light, radiance, or a spectacular visual display.

It means heavy. Weight. Substance. The quality of something that has real, undeniable presence — that reorganises everything around it simply by being what it is.

Episode 6 of ABA The Seed traces one of the most extraordinary movements in all of Scripture — the Kavod of God moving deliberately and relentlessly through history toward humanity.

We begin in Exodus, where Moses asks to see it — not a miracle, not a sign, but the full weight of who God actually is. We watch it fill the Tabernacle so completely that no one can enter. We hear Isaiah declare that the whole earth is full of it — that it was never contained in any building.

And then we arrive in Ezekiel. Where the Kavod departs from the Temple. But not quickly. It moves in stages. It pauses at each threshold. The rabbis counted ten stages of departure — at each one, God lingering. Waiting. Giving every opportunity for the people to turn back.

And when it finally stops, it stops on the Mount of Olives. Still waiting.

A God who hesitates before He leaves is not an impersonal Monad. That is a Father who does not want to go.

But the story does not end with departure. Through Zechariah, God signs a promise with His own Name — Ehyeh — I will be the Kavod in your midst. Personally. Not in a building.

That promise moves through John 1:14, through Pentecost, through the seven spirits sent into all the earth in Revelation 5:6, until Paul looks at everything coming and calls it an eternal weight of glory that makes every present suffering feel like nothing.

The Kavod never stopped moving.

It moved toward us — until it arrived inside us.

This is ABA The Seed — a podcast for everyone who was told their questions were too dangerous.

My name is Aaron. And we are still growing. 🌱

In Episode 2, I asked you to hold onto a word. The Monad.

It has taken us three episodes to get here — because the Name needed its own episode, and the arrival of the Name needed its own episode. But today we finally open it.

The Gnostics were a family of ancient spiritual movements who produced some of the most sophisticated theology in human history. Their primary texts — discovered near Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 — describe the ultimate source of reality in language that is genuinely remarkable.

They called it the Monad. The One. The Invisible Spirit. A being so transcendent it cannot be described, measured, investigated, or seen. Not a being among other beings. Outside of realms of being and time entirely.

I want to give that description a fair hearing. Because they were reaching for something real.

But here is the question their own text raises: they say the Monad produces mercy, generosity, and goodness. For whom? You cannot have mercy in a vacuum. You cannot have generosity without a recipient. The Gnostics described a relational God — and then built a system that made relationship with Him impossible.

And then there is Ezekiel 10. Where the Glory of God departs the Temple because of Israel's idolatry. But He does not leave quickly. He moves slowly. Stage by stage. Hesitating.

A God who doesn't want to leave is not an impersonal concept.

That is a Father.

This is ABA The Seed — a podcast for everyone who was told their questions were too dangerous.

My name is Aaron. And we are still growing. 🌱

A few months ago, a friend sent me a book of wisdom, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. That led me to another of Gibran's works: a collection of fictional accounts from people who encountered Jesus of Nazareth, written to capture his humanity.

But as I read it, I kept feeling something I did not expect.

The accounts felt — ethereal. Like they kept reaching past ordinary human experience toward something else entirely.

And I found myself asking: this man set out to write about Jesus' humanity. But why does it feel kinda divine?

That question is what Episode 4 is built around.

Last time, we sat with a Name so holy that an entire nation fell on their faces when they heard it spoken. A Name that Israel protected behind fence after fence of reverence until it was almost inaccessible.

Today, we follow that Name to where it went.

Into the Gospel of John, where a man from Galilee speaks words that cause crowds to reach for stones. Into a courtroom in Jerusalem, where a High Priest tears his robes. Into a garden at night, where armed soldiers fall to the ground.

And into a promise — that the Name would not stay in a Temple, or in a body walking the roads of Galilee. But would come to live inside the people who receive it.

This is ABA The Seed. A podcast for everyone who was told their questions were too dangerous.

My name is Aaron. And this is where we grow. 🌱

There is a moment in the book of Exodus where a man takes off his shoes. Not because he was asked to rest. Not because the ground was soft. Because he was standing on holy ground.

His name was Moses. He was eighty years old. He had spent forty years in the desert tending someone else's sheep — a former prince of Egypt reduced to a shepherd in Midian.

And then a bush caught fire. And did not burn up. Moses turned aside to look. And from the bush, a voice spoke his name. What happened next is one of the most examined conversations in all of human history. Because Moses asked a question that nobody had thought to ask before.

"When the people ask me — what is His name — what shall I say?"