My Hope

Where are you in your relationship with Christ this Resurrection Sunday? Are you dining at the Passover supper with Jesus- blissfully unaware of what you’ll soon be called to do? Do you know that something is coming, but you’re focused more on who is sitting where? Are you looking for someone to overturn the oppressive government or do you search for a servant king? Maybe you’re in the garden, fighting to stay awake. You know what you’ve been told to do and yet you struggle to obey. Maybe you’ve seen the innocent mistreated and you react in anger and violence rather than allowing God to bring justice. Perhaps you’ve just experienced the death of your Rabbi, teacher and friend. You don’t know what to do and so you hide from this world and wait until things are clearer. You protect yourself by denying your relationship. Maybe you’ve seen the risen Messiah. You have touched his hands and feet. Now he is telling you that you will suffer the same. Will you accept the ...

Easter is coming up soon and I’m excited to see what this reminder of Christ’s resurrection will bring. I know that Christ lives within me the entire year through, but I feel this time of year is an amazing time of both reflection and renewal of my faith. Perhaps it’s because I was baptized on Maundy Thursday fifteen years ago, but I think it’s more than that. We are reminded during this time that death has no grip on us- that Christ has overcome the grave- and Satan has been defeated. I don’t think this is lost on Satan either, so it’s a time we must be prepared to fight the spiritual battles of this world. I gained a different perspective on Easter eight years ago. I’ve always tried to picture it through Jesus’ vantage point but came to realize how it must have pained God to give up his firstborn son as well. He knew it was coming and he knew the grave could not hold him, and yet death would not Passover His begotten Son as it had the Israelites so many years before. I pos...

The girls have noticed differences between their lives and those of our neighbors. I try not to point certain things out, but address them as they naturally occur and this was one of them. As we were driving to our homeschool group one day, M asked me why we had items that our friends didn’t have. I tried my best to explain that quite simply, I don’t know. I don’t know why we were born into safe and secure homes. I don’t know why we were blessed with the intellectual capabilities to succeed at college. I don’t know why. I have an incomplete picture of things- only God sees the bigger picture. But I shared with the girls part of Luke 12:48: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” I explained that we have been given so much- God has been so good to us- we are therefore called to use what we have been entrusted with and give back to others. I felt like a parenting failure when M...