Out of few inevitable things in life - y'know,
death and taxes - a lesser known inevitable is the fact that this one-carriage,
thrice-daily train across the Welsh border will always smell of
wet dog and Monster Munch. But the sky is blue, the sun shines, it's the beginning of the 4-day Easter
weekend.
I'm excited about going home, seeing my family, and I am definitely excited for 4 days of rest and my mother's roast lamb.
I'm trusting that this visit, and the beautiful countryside, will be a healing time. All is not well in my heart. Two weeks of goodbyes, packing, cleaning, moving, living out of bin bags and attempting to make sense of a new job have left me bruised and drained. I have nothing to give. And in the hubbub of my self-centred chaos, I barely hear the whisper of Easter approaching. I feel completely disconnected to what it means for me; yet aware that it's for people feeling just like me today.
In a brilliant book I've been reading by Shauna Niequest, she comments that one of the central messages of the gospel is the cycle of death and rebirth; beautiful sunshine and then rain; losses and new beginnings. She also commented that change is hard, and that if we fight it, it can break us. I read that, some weeks ago, sitting in the sun, thinking 'Well... Yeah, course'. What else is new?
And yet, as I stood dejected in my bare, bin-bag-filled room, I realised that fighting against the change, rallying against it in my heart rather than being open to the new things God might birth, was exactly what I had been doing.
So what does this have to do with Good Friday, with God himself taking on all our sin and pain and loss and destroying it? Well, (as ever), it means there's hope. The hope of rebirth. Things can and will get better. Hurdles can be overcome; joy can be clung to. Death is never the end of the story, and though we might wait 3 days or 30 years for the rebirth, the new hope - it always comes.
I'm excited about going home, seeing my family, and I am definitely excited for 4 days of rest and my mother's roast lamb.
I'm trusting that this visit, and the beautiful countryside, will be a healing time. All is not well in my heart. Two weeks of goodbyes, packing, cleaning, moving, living out of bin bags and attempting to make sense of a new job have left me bruised and drained. I have nothing to give. And in the hubbub of my self-centred chaos, I barely hear the whisper of Easter approaching. I feel completely disconnected to what it means for me; yet aware that it's for people feeling just like me today.
In a brilliant book I've been reading by Shauna Niequest, she comments that one of the central messages of the gospel is the cycle of death and rebirth; beautiful sunshine and then rain; losses and new beginnings. She also commented that change is hard, and that if we fight it, it can break us. I read that, some weeks ago, sitting in the sun, thinking 'Well... Yeah, course'. What else is new?
And yet, as I stood dejected in my bare, bin-bag-filled room, I realised that fighting against the change, rallying against it in my heart rather than being open to the new things God might birth, was exactly what I had been doing.
So what does this have to do with Good Friday, with God himself taking on all our sin and pain and loss and destroying it? Well, (as ever), it means there's hope. The hope of rebirth. Things can and will get better. Hurdles can be overcome; joy can be clung to. Death is never the end of the story, and though we might wait 3 days or 30 years for the rebirth, the new hope - it always comes.
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