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
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.
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