An excerpt from my personal journal…

Ok, no one else is posting so it’s me again…you’re just all going to have to deal with it 🙂

So it seems to me, through different conversations I’ve had with people and my own experience, that some of us are going through a time of difficulty, darkness, death (or whatever other d-word you want to insert here). I wanted to share a portion of a journal entry that, perhaps, is a relevant reflection (no juicy self-disclosures…too bad). So here it is:

“So many of us are in darkness, hiding from ourselves, hiding from others. We just can’t handle seeing ourselves honestly. But as we fight this exposure, this dissolving of the character that we’ve pretended to be, you absorb the blows of our monsters as you continue to woo our vulnerable souls. You continue to invite that simple playful child into the light of the world.

We have to listen to that invitation over and above the many voices around us that say that our souls are not welcome in this world, the voices that say it is not Ok to be as we are. Jesus, enable us to hear your song and for our souls to respond and burst forth into the glorious light.

As the cross represents the full-extent of our ego’s activities, our fears, our self-protection that ends up doing violence to others, so the resurrection represents the soul’s, the child’s victorious entrance into the world. That after all of our violence, all of our rejection of love, all of our reliance on our own self-protection, all of our pride, after all of this, the resurrection declares that despite all, he has still chosen to welcome the soul into the world. As the cross represents the painful death of our own efforts, the death of our images, our self-righteousness, so the resurrection represents the coming to life of that which is deepest within us, the glorious deliverance into a place where we are finally free to live as we’ve longed to live, beyond the fears and restrictions that lock up the soul.

But the cross precedes the resurrection so that we might know that we did not attain this through our own efforts, that we might experience the full-extent of His love. The full extent of His love was shown at the cross because it was in the midst of the full-extent of our violence. Jesus knows that we will only be able to rest in His love when we experience first our crosses then our resurrection. We can rest because we know that all we did was sin and the gift was still given to us. So often we can’t rest in the love of those around us because we know that we have earned it, or manipulated it. Jesus is wise in allowing us to come to the end of our ability to manipulate his love–and He does this for our sake, so that we might rest deeply in him, finally relax in love.”

Anyway, there it is…a short, as always, reflection that may or may not make sense.
Mark