My Hope

Sorry I haven’t written regularly in a while.  I’ve truly been at a loss for words.  I keep trying to make sense of the world around me and fail.  I keep trying to make sense of all the things going on in my own little world and fail.  It does feel sometimes that everything is chasing after the wind.  We just finished an overview study of Ecclesiastes with the girls and one of the things that I hadn’t realized is the wrong way I’d been looking at many of the verses contained inside.  I’ve always heard the verses ‘Everything is meaningless’ and struggled to make sense of it next to having a ‘Purpose driven life’.     Apparently though, the original Hebrew doesn’t use a word that implies meaningless in the way we often see it.  We just don’t have words for it in English.  It is a grasping of the wind, or smoke.  It is here one minute and gone the next; it is felt but cannot be held....

  Every Easter the story is the same, and yet it’s new again.  It never ceases to amaze me how God can open our eyes and draw us in deeper and deeper to a story we thought we already knew by heart.     This year is no exception.  I’ve been reading a book published in 2020 by Dr. Drew Hart called  Who Will be a Witness?  and he highlighted Barabbas, the criminal that the Jews demanded be set free.     Matthew describes him as a notorious prisoner and both Mark and Luke point out that he was a murderer. These were not new to me.  This has shaped the picture I’ve always had of Barabbas.  But when I’ve pictured notorious murders the ones that come to mind are Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer, John Wilkes Booth… I can go on, but you get the picture.  Why would anyone cry for them to be re-released into society?  How could the priests get the crowds so riled up that they would choose someone...