Spring has arrived and Easter is the first Sunday of this month, What a nice way to start. We have begun our Prayer Triads and the study of Sharon Watkins book “Whole”. Camp applications are out and have to be turned in by April 15, the dreaded date for taxes. We have had our first Fellowship Dinner in some time and look forward to the next one. It seems that the hibernation from a cold winter is passing and life is returning.
We rise not to busyness but to love. Jesus’ death and resurrection were not about paying a debt but rather an act of love coming to the rescue. Love that restores us to God’s grace and forgiveness and love that leads us to the place of His brothers and sisters in the eyes of the Father of all. Now we are to respond in kind. Love our neighbor as we should love ourselves. Act toward each other in ways that demonstrate our thankfulness and love toward God. We do this by living as Jesus did, by setting aside our personal desires for comfort and success. We build relationships with those most in need. We restore relationships with those we have wounded. We lift up the fallen and walk with those we who will journey with us, a journey from the “Me-Ness” and the focus on “my” stuff, to the Fellowship of everyone.
Imagine a Fellowship Dinner where there is always a place available at the table and always enough to eat, like feeding 5000 men, not counting women and children. Imagine a world where we work together with our neighbors about differences rather than trying to sue each other for material things.
This sounds so fantastic that it couldn’t be real. But we can hear stories of this being attempted in the wake of the first Easter. Concern of others replaced the concerns of self. Maybe it didn’t last very long, maybe it can never really happen again, but Jesus dared us to live in the Kingdom of God now, in this world.
As Christians, shouldn’t we try again?
Shalom, Darrell
