Weather Report From Heaven: Sunny and bright, with an abundance of light and lots of singing and rejoicing.
Scripture: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”- John 16:33
Insight: I saw this comment from a ministry partner who is serving orphaned children in Ukraine the other day and it really touched my heart and soul. It felt like it could be true for how a lot of people are feeling post Easter Sunday. It simply said “My heart is broken on levels I didn’t know possible. My hope is stronger than I knew would be necessary.” This life is often very messy and it can be tough to pivot from the euphoria Christians just felt from celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, back into the mundane reality that life on earth has to continue on and it can be painful. I am pretty sure nothing I am facing is as tragic and stark as what our ministry partner is facing in Ukraine right now, seeing the atrocities of war upfront and personal on a daily basis, with children displaced from their parents and missing the stability they so desperately need in their lives right now, but yet my life like everyone’s has many challenges, and the Holy Week we just went through magnified some of the biggest ones. My extended family is broken. Life long hostilities and brokenness are still unhealed. We drove a long way to try and get together with my brother and mother for a Good Friday service only to find out that a fight which had occurred earlier that day between them had made that impossible. That trip as it turned out only served to remind me of how broken a world we live in when parent and child let long simmering hostilities remain unresolved, and it becomes a race to the bottom of who can say the cruelest things to one another. It is not what Jesus wanted, and not what we drove a long way for, but it is reality. People are flawed, and if we are not willing to let Jesus in to heal our emotional infirmities, we go through life with a searing pain that makes reconciliation virtually impossible because in our flesh we are not able to forgive as Jesus taught us too. It takes relinquishing our control over our life to Him in order to win the battle that sin wages on our flesh, and many people fail at this, even those with good intentions. Full surrender is required, nothing else will ever lead to the deep, uncircumstantial peace we all are longing for. CS Lewis said it this way: “God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.”
Yet, despite all this familial pain swirling all around me, I probably in some tangential way found more hope in the message our Pastor preached this Resurrection Sunday than I had in a long time. It just seemed to deeply resonate that while this world is broken, we still have an unwavering hope and faith in the One who died for our sins to give us eternal life, and who is one day going to return to make everything new and take away all of our pains and sorrows of this life, and “wipe away all of our tears,” as Revelation 21:4 promises. It is the paradox of the Christian faith: We live in a broken world with great pain, and yet we have a hope that is eager to live in the truth of God’s promises and can comfort us in the most trying of times because of what Jesus accomplished on the Cross of Calvary. The Apostle Paul summed up the truth for most of us as we deal with our post Easter euphoria slamming into the reality of the starkness of life’s pain and brokenness this way in 2 Corinthians 4:6-10: “For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.”
Prayer: Father God, thank You for what You did for us on Easter through Your Son Jesus. It gives us an inextinguishable hope to persevere through the tough times of this life. We pray for your strength to be the wind under our sails that carries us forward, even when the storms of this life are all around us. Amen!
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