Whoever we are, and whatever are place in life
may be, we all spend some time in our own personal Garden of Gethsemane; we all
spend some time on our own personal cross.
*
When each of us was conceived, God breathed his
love into the beginnings of what would become our earthly body. This breath of
God is our immortal soul. It is a part of God, just like a wave is a part of
the ocean. It is meant to find its way back home to God; it is meant to live
with God forever. Life is
the journey of our soul back home to its loving Creator.
Life is a gift and it is beautiful. There are times of joy and fulfillment, but sometimes life doesn’t make sense. There is chaos, there is darkness; bad things happen. We all face times of hurt, loss and grief: perhaps the death of a loved one, or the loss of a job, or a betrayal by a friend, or maybe positive results from a biopsy, or guilt and remorse over something we’ve done or failed to do. Whoever we are, and whatever our place in life may be, we all spend some time in our own personal Garden of Gethsemane, we all spend some time on our own personal cross.
No matter how good we are, or how hard we try, none of us can escape the pain and contradictions of human existence. The symbol of our faith is itself a contradiction: the cross, two opposing beams of wood made from the tree of life, used to torture and destroy life; and in the center of the contradiction, we find God in human form.
But the message of the cross is hope. It tells us that we are not alone; that God is with us in the chaos and the darkness; he is present in the pain, the loss, the suffering; he is there at the center of the contradiction, at the center of our cross. And someday, once we are free of the constraints of human existence and the limitations of human understanding, it will all make sense.
The bad things that happen in life, and the suffering that exists, are locked in a moment in time. But God, as well as each of our immortal souls, is timeless; and God is with us here in time, holding our hand as we go through our suffering, as we carry our cross. If we could see our resurrection and the timeless love that await us, the sufferings that we witness and endure here in life might more easily be understood.
The cross of Good Friday is a message from God, a God who loves us so deeply that he took human form and came into our time and space to rescue us from our mistakes, and to redeem us by example; our God who chose to ride the bus of life with us, to live, laugh, weep, suffer and die with us; our God who was born a baby in a manger, wept at Gethsemane, and died on a cross just to show us the way to get home. All that God asks in return is that we love and forgive each other as he loves and forgives us.
As we pray before the cross on Good Friday, and everyday, let us listen in our soul to that message from God, that message that calls to us through our own Gethsemanes, our own crosses, our own sufferings:
Life is a gift and it is beautiful. There are times of joy and fulfillment, but sometimes life doesn’t make sense. There is chaos, there is darkness; bad things happen. We all face times of hurt, loss and grief: perhaps the death of a loved one, or the loss of a job, or a betrayal by a friend, or maybe positive results from a biopsy, or guilt and remorse over something we’ve done or failed to do. Whoever we are, and whatever our place in life may be, we all spend some time in our own personal Garden of Gethsemane, we all spend some time on our own personal cross.
No matter how good we are, or how hard we try, none of us can escape the pain and contradictions of human existence. The symbol of our faith is itself a contradiction: the cross, two opposing beams of wood made from the tree of life, used to torture and destroy life; and in the center of the contradiction, we find God in human form.
But the message of the cross is hope. It tells us that we are not alone; that God is with us in the chaos and the darkness; he is present in the pain, the loss, the suffering; he is there at the center of the contradiction, at the center of our cross. And someday, once we are free of the constraints of human existence and the limitations of human understanding, it will all make sense.
The bad things that happen in life, and the suffering that exists, are locked in a moment in time. But God, as well as each of our immortal souls, is timeless; and God is with us here in time, holding our hand as we go through our suffering, as we carry our cross. If we could see our resurrection and the timeless love that await us, the sufferings that we witness and endure here in life might more easily be understood.
The cross of Good Friday is a message from God, a God who loves us so deeply that he took human form and came into our time and space to rescue us from our mistakes, and to redeem us by example; our God who chose to ride the bus of life with us, to live, laugh, weep, suffer and die with us; our God who was born a baby in a manger, wept at Gethsemane, and died on a cross just to show us the way to get home. All that God asks in return is that we love and forgive each other as he loves and forgives us.
As we pray before the cross on Good Friday, and everyday, let us listen in our soul to that message from God, that message that calls to us through our own Gethsemanes, our own crosses, our own sufferings:
I
am with you in the chaos and the darkness,
I
am present in the pain, the loss, the suffering,
I
am holding your hand at the center of the contradiction,
I
am here at the center of your cross.
I
love you, and am with you for always.
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