Forsaken?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.

Psalm 22

The beauty of Holy Week is the invitation to walk with Christ in a profoundly human experience.  Who has not felt forsaken by God ?

Who has not felt the anguish of pleading for help and hearing no echoing assurance ?

We are fragile, and yet that fragility is also our beauty.  We are weak, and our weakness brings us again and again to Christ.

We cry out, and Christ cries with us.  We feel abandoned by the God we believed would never leave us, and Christ is closer to us in that abandonment than at any other time on our journey.

The Cross is a place suspended out of time.  As our God hangs upon the Cross, blessings and comforts and salvation move out like multicolored ribbons to encircle the whole world.  For those who know Him and for those who have not yet known Him, Jesus offers His whole life.

Let us receive what He, who died for us, is offering.  A new life, a vulnerable life, a REAL life.

Blessings,

Debra

Beloved Servant

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.

Phillipians 2 : 5-8

When I read this passage about the Lord that I am trying to follow, I pause.  Sometimes my breath shortens and I am afraid.  Sometimes, my breath is simply taken away.

Christ has humbled himself because of love.  Christ is obedient because of love.  Christ is God made human being because of love.

It has always been hard for me to look at the journey to the Cross and the Crucifixion as anything other than terrible.  I look at the folly of humankind as together we kill the One who has come to save us.  And this story has been repeated again and again when mobs congregate and kill the one with wisdom to heal or help.  We want our own way !  We want a scapegoat.

But God is offering a Servant King-a Beloved Saviour who serves humankind.  This kind of love is too much to comprehend and it is, often, too much to approach.  That is why I stay in the safety of horror rather than the deeply unfamiliar territory of Loving Sacrifice.

If God is giving a new life to me, what am I doing with it ?

As I approach Holy Week this year, I am going to keep close to Love.  I am going to open my heart to what God wants to show me in Jesus’ sacrifice.  I am coming to Holy Week as an innocent, as if I had never been down this road.

Won’t you join me ?

Blessings,

 Debra