sacrifice

Somehow I get puzzled when I see so many Christians living in luxury and singing 'Jesus, I my cross have taken, all to leave and follow Thee,' and remember how my wife died in a tenement in New York City, gasping for air and asking God to take the little girl too. Of course I don't expect you people can prevent every one from dying of starvation, lack of proper nourishment and tenement air, but what does following Jesus mean?

If I can somehow focus on the pain of not focusing on my pain, I will soon find that pain healed simply because I forced myself to do the exact opposite of what my core humanity demanded I do_I sought to heal the pain of someone else instead.

Sooner or later I will realize that the very things I most desperately need are the very things I am unable to give myself. Therefore, I will either be left despising the fact that I am doomed to live out a life that is perpetually empty, or I will realize that an empty tomb is the single thing that will eternally fill me.

Maybe I don__ have enough beginnings in my life because I fought against the endings that were about to birth those beginnings.

Easter is God throwing everything at death so that I can give everything to life.

I am pressed to admit that I don__ have the capacity to understand the bloodied horrors of a cross and the wild exhilaration of an empty tomb. But at the point that I think I completely understand God, I have at that very point humanized Him and in that very action I have lost Him. Therefore, I much prefer to simply marvel.

We need to know that our limits do not define our limitations. And an empty tomb does exactly that.

Do I dare believe such an absurdly outrageous story that a man would die, lay lifeless in some tomb for three days and then somehow live again? Yet, if I dare to consider it, is that not exactly what I so desperately desire for this lifeless life of mine? And is Easter God__ tenderly outrageous way of telling me that that is exactly what I can have?

Reasonably speaking, we can see the cross as entirely possible. But in considering Easter, we see an empty tomb as entirely impossible. And is it possible that God had to do the impossible to finally get our attention?

A god of the __ossible_ is no God.

Easter is a time when God turned the inevitability of death into the invincibility of life.

There are an incalculable number of things within me that I frantically wish to be emptied of, and despite my most earnest efforts to remove them, they remain. And it is Easter that reminds me that God empties out tombs.

Although I rail against it, death is the dark demarcation beyond which I am at the mercy of my own end. To the contrary, an empty tomb says that my end is at the mercy of God__ beginning.

Easter is the final solution to the finality of death.

God emptied out that first tomb so that He could turn around and empty out me.

If God has the answer to every question, maybe my appreciation for God should be shaped more by the number of questions and less by the wisdom of the answers.

Easter is the invulnerable tale of utter selflessness where at an inestimable cost God did for us what He did not need done for Himself. And that kind of __oing_ happens every day.

Easter says that every ending ever experienced by man is exquisitely crafted to find its own ending at the feet of a fresh beginning.