Alive!

I am alive. It is a reason to celebrate. I breathe in, deep, slow, wide, and exhale. I smile; I laugh; I read; I write on my computer: so many reasons in those activities for gratitude and celebration. I can choose to smile. I have a voice to speak with, to laugh with. I have eyes to read and the education to know how. I have the money to own a computer and the time to sit at it and write. I know how to type fast. I have internet access and can find out all sorts of interesting things whenever I want to.

Count your many blessings, count them one by one: an old hymn with much truth in it. As I go through my blessings, any complaints begin to shrivel, deprived of oxygen. As I raise my voice to praise God for his grace and goodness towards me, I rise and my problems shrink. Focused on God my creator and saviour, worries begin to fade. The greater the focus, the faster the fade. 

Jesus. Immanuel. God with us. God with us. Chew that over for awhile and you can’t help but marvel. I mean, how did I get to be in God’s presence? I don’t deserve it. I so don’t deserve it. Yet he has poured his life into me through the power of the Holy Spirit. Poured his life into me. 

He empowers me to be all that I can be in Jesus. 

I am born again; my spirit is on fire for my Lord and King. How could any other response be possible to the amazing love I have been shown?

Sense of Place

Last night I spent three hours downloading the pictures from my recent trips onto my laptop, and then sorting them into folders, hopefully to jog my memory in the future as to which field or church each depicts.

Some pictures won’t need me to have left a clue. Like the pictures walking down the Mount of Olives to Gethsemane.

I walked again last night from the top of the Mount of Olives, past the crouching bunkers in the oldest Jewish cemetery in the world, which are decorated not with flowers from loved ones, but with rocks to show they had visited. Each tomb has its own square ‘window’; in Jewish thought, we were told, a person is not completely dead for three days, by which time the body has been buried, so there is an escape hatch left for the soul to rise heavenwards.

There was a wee window on the tomb in which Jesus’ body was probably laid to rest. But of course his entire body rose from death, and so the round stone needed to be rolled away. He’d never have fit out the escape hatch. (...although his Resurrection body could walk through walls, so I suppose in fact, the stone was rolled away so that John, Peter and Mary could see for themselves that he was no longer there).

Jesus died to make a way for us to escape the consequences of sin and death. It wasn’t enough for us to have a wee hatch through which the most noble parts of our character might escape to heaven, sloughing off the sinful natures we all have. No. God rolled the stone away, so that Jesus might walk free, and we might walk free with him.

Jesus didn’t make an escape hatch for when we die, though. It’s an open door to walk through while we are still alive here on earth, so that we might live full lives here and now, every day. Jesus told his disciples that the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, was near. It’s as near as your heart. 

I am getting ready to walk through the week preceding Easter prayerfully, thoughtfully, alert to God’s whisper, alive to his touch. I am getting ready to weep at the betrayal by his friend, to cry at his abandonment by friends who were as close as family, to feel bereft to realize how often I betray and abandon him. 

And to rejoice on Easter morning, as the stone is rolled away and Jesus, and I in him, can walk out alive, and free.