Easter

Mama, You Love Jesus?

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As we move into Holy Week, starting this weekend with Palm Sunday right through to next weekend with Good Friday and Easter Sunday morning, I am sharing something I wrote a few Good Fridays ago. I am thankful that I captured this memory; it still touches me even though we’re moving into a different season with our kids. If you are in a time of your life right now where Easter feels like just another thing to get through, I pray that as you “pass by Jesus on the cross”, He makes an impact on you right where you are. 

Let me set the scene for the following story: I was bone-tired. Between parenting a four year old and a two year old, we were facing a long and uncertain road with our three month old who was in the middle of treatments for a concerning and very rare genetic condition that had come as a surprise after she was born.

I felt like the billows were rolling in the sea of our life. 

I was hanging on to Jesus with white knuckles and it was bringing me to my knees.

***

Yesterday my oldest daughter asked me, “Mama, you love Jesus?”

With tears in my eyes, I answered, “yes, I do love Jesus.”

And then I wept.

It had been a day already (if you know what I mean), and it was only 10am.  We were sitting at the table with little yogurt cups, some strawberries and a bit of banana bread we had baked together the day before.

For almost the entire hour beforehand, we battled.  And we were all exhausted.

As we ate, I responded to yet another question about Easter, explaining the good news for probably the sixth time this week.  Daily questions about who Jesus is, why He died, why He rose, what it all means… Lord have mercy!  I didn’t know you needed a theology degree to have kids!

That’s when she looked up across the table at me with those big blue eyes and said, “Mama, you love Jesus?”

It broke me.  I nearly couldn’t pull myself back together.  My middle girl said, “Mama, don’t cry!  Are you crying?”

“Yes,” I said. “But not because I am sad.  I am crying because I really do love Jesus very much.”

Easter usually turns out to be a very emotional season for me. It’s where the depth of my need meets the breadth of a love I cannot fathom, and that truth pierces my heart in unexpected moments where I see its transformative power in action.

The day continued on in its ups and downs late into the evening, with a few glimpses of glory.  But most of it was made of moments that made me whisper, “Grace, Jesus.  Your grace.  Only Your grace today.”

The next morning, my body felt broken.  I was up a couple of times in the night, and my eyes were puffy from crying tears of exhaustion.

Church?  People?  No thanks.  Besides, we already did communion with the kids at the table this morning.  Grape juice and homemade white bread.

But it was Good Friday.  Part of my heart wanted to be at church, even though I knew I probably would not be able to sit through the service with the two youngest kids.  So I swallowed my pride over feeling like I needed to look capable and we did it.  And let’s face it, the truth shines through in all its radiance with three energetic kids 4 and under, a mom-ponytail and a baggy sweatshirt because my other jacket still doesn’t quite fit after having our latest cherub-cheeked girlie. I went solo because my husband had to work.

Walking into that church, I already knew I wouldn’t catch much of the Good Friday service.

But somewhere in the middle of cuddling a baby and entertaining a toddler with sniffles in a room on the side of the sanctuary, my heart was lifted by what I heard through the speaker piping in the message from the other room:

“Even those who passed by Jesus up on that cross were impacted by Him.”

Passing Him by.  That’s exactly how it feels sometimes when you’re in the thick of raising tiny humans.

But I say this with certainty:  even if you feel like you’re just passing by Jesus today, with all the things that life and seasons bring, He makes an impact on you.

I tried to take the two youngest into the sanctuary for communion, but the baby started fussing and our toddler chose that moment, that holy moment before communion, to start shouting, “NOOOO! I don’t WANT to whisper!”

So we headed back to the side room.

I may not have been able to get to the church communion table this morning, but He met me at the kitchen table.

In a place I did not expect.

cross and heart

An Easter craft by one of my children a few years ago.

The Season is Changing

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Anyone else stumbling around in a post-time change fog this week?

Yikes.

I read once that it takes three weeks to fully adjust to a new schedule, so hopefully by the end of the month we’ll be caught up on the sleep we’ve missed!

Give me all the daylight, though. Every day we’re getting closer to 10pm sunsets and 5am sunrises, and the twilight hours that fill the hours in between. We’ll be making up for the winter darkness.

I smelled mud the other day and I remembered spring. It took me by surprise. I was in a parking lot and the heavy, earthy scent drifted past, bringing with it a sudden swell of hope! Same with the sound of water trickling through the downspout as the snow melts off the roof.

Ordinary evidence that the season is changing, and with it, the things we spend our time and energy on.

It’s the Lenten season. I recently read a Lent devotional that seemed to pit personal times of worship against serving the least of these in our community, as if the former is selfish and the latter is spiritual. It seemed to say that reading our Bibles and spending time in prayer is meant to somehow impress God with our efforts to be holy, when our energies would be better spent serving those among us who are truly in need.

It broke my heart.

When we put our faith in Christ, the Bible teaches that we become Christ’s righteousness before God. When God looks at us, He doesn’t see our vain efforts to impress, He sees Jesus.

2 Corinthians 5:17-21 says,

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

So why should we view the Lenten season as some sort of exercise in spiritual pride, bent on giving us brownie points with God? If that’s what Lent is for you, I strongly recommend you rethink this season.

That last verse gets me every single time: God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. When we understand exactly what Jesus did for us, we no longer see these seasons of examining our hearts and engaging in repentance and renewal as an effort to impress Him with how spiritual we are. We fall down in worship, fully surrendering our proud hearts and recognizing that there is no other Person who can bring us back in to a right relationship with a Holy Creator to whom we owe the very breath in our lungs.

I will say, though, that these times of worship must bring about lasting change in our hearts! And out of that change comes minds that are transformed by the truth of God’s Word, hearts that are open to the Holy Spirit, eyes that are searching for opportunities to put Christ’s love in action, and hands that are ready to serve Him by serving others.

I think the author of the Lent devotional is right in pointing out that inaction is a grave mistake that we would do well to pay attention to. But I am sad when I see worship and service pitted against each other.

In the weeks leading up to Easter I’ve begun to read the Gospels of Luke and John, once again re-living the life of Christ and praying that God will move in my heart through the story spread out on the pages. My heart has been stunned and amazed and encouraged by Jesus! And most often, I am finding that service of the least of these consists of pouring practical love on the very people that are right in front of me.

frozen bunny tracks

I found these frozen animal tracks one morning.

How Could He?

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We sat on the soft couch in the early spring sunshine, huddled around a storybook Bible for kids.

“How could he?” she cried. Our five year old was hearing, really hearing for the first time, that God looked away from Jesus for a moment while He was on the cross.

“His own son! How could He look away from His own son?” Her bottom lip quivered and her brow sunk low. I could see tears forming behind her glasses. “Why, Mama, why did He do that?” She covered her face.

I put my arm around her. “It is very sad, isn’t it?” I said. I tried to explain how Jesus took our sin on Him, and that God couldn’t look at sin, so He had to look away. “But why did He do that?” she wailed.

She wasn’t asking for the theological explanation.

She was asking why it had to happen like this – why even the Father left Jesus utterly alone.

At our house, Easter always brings out the toughest questions about why Jesus had to die and how He could take away all of our sins. It’s this strange mix of egg hunts and execution, bunnies and burial cloths. And then, the great exhale of wonderful relief when we learn that Jesus, who was once dead, has come back to life again.

We live in this tension between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

We suffer the fallen nature of the world and the effects of sin while we await the glorious fulfillment of His promise of eternal life.

In the between time, we work to stay faithful to Him and build His kingdom in a world with a kingdom of its own, the kind that shouts you are a dangerous fool if you believe in anything other than the tangible and material, if you stand for something other than yourself, if you entrust your life to Someone instead of your emotions and feelings.

“In this world you will have trouble – but take heart, I have overcome the world!” – Jesus (John 16)

Jesus, as we remember Your sacrifice and victory this Easter weekend, let us be strengthened by the Holy Spirit to worship You in the face of doubt and questions. Let those questions and struggles remind us that while we don’t know everything, You do. And that is precisely why we bow in worship -You are God, Your love is unchanging, and You will never forsake us.

Jesus Storybook Bible

Image: “The Jesus Storybook Bible”, Sally Lloyd-Jones/Jago

On Palm Branches and Dashed Hopes

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palm leaf

As we were pulling up to church one Palm Sunday a few years ago, we realized we forgot something.  Time was tight, so I dropped the kids off with my husband and took the baby with me to run back and get it.  I thought I might be able to make it back in time.

But I missed it.

My favourite part of Palm Sunday:  the Kids Palm March.

On the Sunday before Easter, the kids get to wave Palm branches and march around the church during the first few worship songs.  When they get to the front, the branches are placed in a glass vase of water sitting under a wooden cross draped with purple fabric.

Amid the frustration of running back home, the disappointment of returning too late, and the general isolation of being a mom of a little one who is too noisy and busy for the service and too sniffly to play in the nursery, I felt sad.

My heart was heavy as I followed my little one around the back of the gym, praise music filling my ears.  My eyes scanned the front and settled on the cloth-draped cross with the large beautiful palm branches sitting beneath it, and strangely, I understood.

Those palm branches held such hope for the people who had waved them by a dusty road into Jerusalem so long ago.

Hope that never came to fruition.

The King of Kings riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, welcomed by crowds expecting a political revolution.

Only days later, the King of Kings, mocked, beaten, left to die on a rough wooden cross.

Here’s what a palm branch looks like the day AFTER it has been waved with great enthusiasm.

shrivelled palm.png

Spent.  Tired.  Shrivelled.

And rightly so.  Palm branches are not meant to last forever.  Our hope was never in a palm branch.

Our hope is in the King of Kings.

And the rest of the story is still coming.