ChrisCross by Charlie Glendining

A New Perspective This Easter
I am on a constant search for fresh/new perspectives on recurrent Holidays. I don't like to get stale. Well i read this on a friends blog.

Here we are... the darkness before the dawn. Ever since our men were boys we've been making a cross out of the Christmas tree we saved all winter. I just did it half an hour ago. The smell of the evergreen as I lopped off the branches put me right back in the living room during the weeks before Christmas. What a violence to do to such a wonderful memory! Maybe Mary felt that way at the cross to see the tender little feet of her son that she used to kiss while He slept now violently nailed to the cross. We lose sight... no... actually never CAN really understand His innocence.

Coming through Lent and entering into Easter is a paradox. This balancing act between the joy of Christ's nativity and the despair of His passion is to try to reconcile both Alpha and Omega. It is an irony that electrifies the brain: like grabbing both the positive and negative poles of a battery at the same time. But ONLY through embracing both His birth and His death and resurrection simultaneously, can we see that all events of our lives—both good and bad—show us the completeness of who Christ wants to become in each of us.

Denying or rejecting the bad and seeking only the good is a desperate yearning forsomething that isn't real. Just as God never gives His Spirit in part, when we seek Him in part—only in the good times—we create a partial void in our spirit and actually deny the complete Christ... at least the whole of who He wants to become in us. In other words, by claiming only the good things to be of God, that partial emptiness becomes a kind of poison that masquerades as virtue. Those bad things, then become a way WE can suffer for a God Who isn't all-powerful.What a denial of His complete omniscience! If He is the God of good things, then He must also be the God of bad. He orchestrates ALL THINGS. This is surely disturbing and comforting at the same time: this restless peace we experience when we realize that God is in complete control—even, and ESPECIALLY in the midst of our suffering.

Ten years ago, I read the heart rending story about Corey Anderson, the nine-year-old boy who, on February 25, 1999, died in a blizzard while looking for his dog. The immediate similarity between his selfless act and Christ's shedding the comforts of heaven to walk into our world, actually into the very the jaws of hell to find us, was even more striking when I found out that Corey walked out his front door into a blinding snow storm on a Thursday night—his Gethsemani—and they discovered his body in a thicket 200 yards from his homeon Sunday. Three days and three nights: Christ's suffering from Gethsemani to the resurrection and Jonah's suffering the terrors in the belly of a whale.

But the most striking revelation was an aspect rarely considered when we look at the body of a grown man suffering on a cross. It's hard to fully comprehend Christ's innocence because of our own sinful paradigm. We see, fastened to this cross, an adult. He can deal with it. He's tough. He's a man. He's powerful. Omnipotent. He's God.

But Corey's death makes us ache for the death of a child—the very death of innocence. If it is easier to grieve the death of this nine-year-old boy, how much more innocent was Jesus when He died for us, and how can we really understand the true impact of His death unless we continually mix the images of Christmas and Easter?

What if we were to visualize the unthinkable image of of a crucified baby? Too unthinkable to even mention?...maybe then we are on the right track.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~A RESTLESS PEACE~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"For He made Him Who knew no sin TO BE sin for us..." - 2 COR. 5:21

It is a God-like grace that seeks the lost in sacrifice;
That fords the sill and walks into the silent teeth.
Blinded, not by fear but by a perfect love for the beloved,
His courage found its sticking place and ours, a silent grief.

What child is this who laid to rest in such a manger bed?
How desperate, this, a brush of bitter myrrh his womb?
What awful grace of Christ is this: to die in innocence,
And sleep, thou infant life, in this cold thicket tomb?

Three days, three nights did torment's pale and bloodless choirQuench hope inside the belly of Gethsemani.But hope it was that wrapped my guilt in swadling clothes,His shroud—my womb—a safety born of agony.Now, here in Lent, the balance of the manger and the grave,Our hearts contain a restless peace to gain His loss.We grieve the rage of sin that smote His upturned baby's face;That plucked Him from His Mother's breast,To nail Him to His Father's cros

Where are we going?

Honestly, until this week I have felt like we didn't know what would happen next, but now at least it seems that God has supplied for me to stay in the insurance business. That allows us to walk forward with the idea of staying here in McMinnville, possibly buying the house we are in, considering what ministry we can do through our location and more. God is leading and we are trying to follow. We watched a DVD with some friends this past monday that really spoke to me about approaching each day with openness to whatever God wants to do. This is so often said, but hardly practiced. That is what it seems God is teaching me. I trust that he will take us where we need to go. Please pray with us about where we are going with our ministry.

What a week!

Well this was my last week of "Validation" in the insurance business.  I will find out next Wednesday officially if I made it, but I'm pretty sure I did thanks to some friends and a move of God.  On Tuesday I was still way behind and was shown the numbers by my boss.  He said "it would take a miracle."  Well, It was great to see it all come together and to continue to watch God supply in many ways.  I some much more giving God the glory for it all than anything for me.  This week was clearly Gods work not mine.

It did however come down to the last day, and as I was out running around getting forms signed and making sure I had done all I could do, there was a big storm blowing through.  This seemed fitting, that something would try to keep it from happening, but It would work out anyway. 

Here is a picture from when I went out to my Friend Craig's house after the storm to get one final paper signed.  The pole sticking out of the ground and other poles laying further down and the first of many pieces of their trampoline that was anchored down, but fell victim to the winds of the storm. 

 

We also had my sister Hannah and her Husband Daniel visiting this past week.  Unfortunately, when Daniel arrived he was sick and after a visit to our great Doc.  we found out he has Mono, so while he re-cooperated, I sold insurance, the boys started their baseball seasons, and life kept on going with the usual amounts of stress, love, excitement, and more. 

 

 

 

 

Hope everyone has a great Resurrection Sunday. 

What a challenge to separate the pagan from the religious, from the real meaning of this weekend!  It has been better for us to not have to worry so much about the religous and to instead enjoy the relationships God has given us.  May the Lord of Life reveal his power to us all, whether it be in a church service, a conversation, a storm, or a any other way He desires.  Just don't miss it!

Posted via email from MMerge's posterous

Was Good Friday Really "Good"

embedding was disabled so i couldn't post the video here but go watch this today in honor of the One we should cry out to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOb8ihacSM4

It's difficult for me to "celebrate, Good Friday" as good. Good things are usually a lot of fun for me and i usually don't have a problem "celebrating" things. However, every year as Good Friday approaches, I balk. I must take rememberance of in order to grasp and look at Good Friday.

Title: Apportioned Limitations
Author: Elisabeth Elliot

The God who determined the measurements of the foundations of the earth sets limitations to the scope of our work. And His SON's work. It is always tempting to measure ourselves by one another, but this easily leads to boasting or despair. It is our business to find the sphere of service allotted to us, and do all that He has appointed us to do within that sphere, not "commending ourselves."

Paul said, "We will keep to the limits God has apportioned us" (2 Cor 10:13 RSV). Today, on Good Friday, the day Jesus was captured, tortured and began his sentencing leading to his death, it's hard to see "limits". He pretty much gave all, willingly. But Jesus did that(he did keep to the limits God had apportioned him)--willing to become a helpless, newborn baby, to be a growing child, an adolescent, a man, each stage bounded by its peculiar strictures, yet each offering adequate scope in which to glorify his Father. And He went to the furthest limit apportioned, being tortured and sacrificed and crucified for us!
Lord, glorify yourself through me and in the place You've set me. Let me not covet another's place or work or glory. from www.elizabetheliott.org/devotional
italics mine.

Do You Taste Like Chocolate

This made me laugh and smile inside and out, all at the same time! Good morning and Enjoy! Go out today and "Let Your Light Shine"!

For Those Who Suffer Great Losses

Here's an exerpt from a devotion i read: http://www.elisabethelliot.org/devotional.html

If resurrection is a fact--and there would be no Easter if it were not--then there is no situation so hopeless, no horizon so black, that God cannot there "find His glory." The truth is that without those ruined hopes, without that death, without the suffering that He called inevitable, the glory itself would be impossible. Why the universe is so arranged we must leave to the One who arranged it, but that it is so we are bound to believe.

And when we find ourselves most hopeless, the road most taxing, we may also find that it is then that the Risen Christ catches up to us on the way, better than our dreams, beyond all our hopes. For it is He--not His gifts, not His power, not what He can do for us, but He Himself--who comes and makes Himself known to us. And this is the one pure joy for those who sorrow.

And yet... and yet we sorrow. The glorious fact of the resurrection is the very heart of our faith. We believe it. We bank all our hopes on it. And yet we sorrow. It is still appointed unto man once to die, and those who are left must grieve--not as those without hope, for the beloved will be resurrected. The "ultimate contradiction," however, seems very far in the future. There is no incongruity in the human tears and the pure joy of the presence of Christ, for He wept human tears too.

a note E.E. wrote to a friend who had just lost a child.
"Your little note was waiting for us when we returned yesterday from Canada. How our hearts went running to you, weeping with you, wishing we could see your faces and tell you our sympathies. Yet it is 'no strange thing' that has happened to you, as Peter said in his epistle (1 Peter 4:12) it gives you a share in Christ's suffering. To me this is one of the deepest but most comforting of all the mysteries of suffering. Not only does He enter into grief in the fullest understanding, suffer with us and for us, but in the very depths of sorrow He allows us, in His mercy, to enter into His; gives us a share, permits us the high privilege of 'filling up, that which is lacking (Colossians 1:24) in His own. He makes, in other words, something redemptive out of our broken hearts, if those hearts are offered up to Him. We are told that He will never despise a broken heart. It is an acceptable sacrifice when offered wholly to Him for His transfiguration. Oh, there is so much for us to learn here, but it will not be learned in a day or a week. Level after level must be plumbed as we walk with the Shepherd, and He will do His purifying, purging, forging, shaping work in us, that we may be shaped to the image of Christ himself. Such shaping takes a hammer, a chisel, and a file--painful tools, a painful process.

"Jesus learned obedience by the things which He suffered, not by the things which He enjoyed. In order to fit you both for His purposes both here and in eternity, He has lent you this sorrow. But He bears the heavier end of the Cross laid upon you!

I'm thankful this morning that LIFE can be given to dead things!