It’s been a good Friday…
What Love Looks Like
It has been a good Friday 🙂
On my way in to the Good Friday service today I was feeling a bit despondent about the state of the world…reading news reports at the moment can do that to you.
I don’t know what I can do to help (except to pray, which is the first and best option).
There’s deceit and misinformation and cruelty and apathy abounding these days.
And I’m just me…but still with a responsibility to stretch, and dare, where I can to speak God’s love and hope into hurt and darkness.
I can get a bit tangled up in knots trying to make sense of what that means in the everyday.
But today is a day to remember that God so loved the world…and Jesus came to save it, rather than condemn.
Good to know the fate of the world is not on my shoulders!
I still need to offer my hands, and feet, and voice.
But I know where to go to ask the whys and hows, and where to start on the path to a new day.
This was released 16 years ago.
Still relevant.
❤
When The Water Is Too Deep
Most mornings I go down to the pool. I don’t really swim – don’t like getting my ears in the water – but I walk back and forth across the middle of the pool. Some days the water is clear, and I walk without stopping. Some days I stop to rescue various insects that have found themselves out of their depth. Occasionally it seems as though the entire insect population of our area has decided to take a dip…
Most of these rescues are for small creatures – beetles or waspy type things. Sometimes I come across a bee. And, very rarely, it’s bigger – a very large stick insect, or a dragonfly. Unfortunately, they’re often already dead, so I place them beside the pool. There are mornings, though, when I can actually save a little being, and that cheers me up for the day. I love saving bees and yesterday I scooped up a butterfly, which I thought was dead, but started fluttering cautiously once the sun dried off its wings.
Here’s a dragonfly from the other day – sadly I was too late to save it, but it’s still beautiful.
Many years ago my Babe and I were in a takeaway waiting for our chips for tea. We lived in Southampton then, and it was that fuggy type of atmosphere you get when the weather’s cold but you’re sitting in a small shop where there’s food cooking… the air was humid and there was moisture running down the windows. Just beside the door there was an insect trying frantically to get out – beating against the glass, seeing the fading light outside and wanting to be out there. We tried our best to guide it towards the door, but it kept getting away from us and back to the window.
I am so much bigger than the insects I try to help, and to them my guiding hand must seem like just another obstacle they need to avoid. It’s frustrating for me – I don’t want to see them drown – but I can understand the fear of something you can’t see or comprehend but that looks like it’s in your way when you’re just trying to survive. I manage to rescue most things (although a fair number are already dead) but a few I just have to leave. All their fearful dodging takes them too far out for me to reach.
Tomorrow is Good Friday. It might feel as though I’m trying to shoehorn a lesson in here, but both these situations remind me of the Easter story – of the times in my life when I’ve been floundering in deep waters but not quite seeing the divine hand reaching out to lift me. Thankfully, God is patient…
Tomorrow, we will go to church and sing and eat hot cross buns. We will, once again, take the time to remember the love that God has for us.
And after the Easter season is over, we’ll go back to our everyday lives, where we will still frequently catch glimpses of that other kingdom…
Waiting, Far Off
A quiet roar
one
he lays his left hand along the beam
hand that moulded clay into fluttering birds
hand that cupped wild flowers to learn their peace
hand that stroked the bee’s soft back and touched death’s sting
two
he stretches his right hand across the grain
hand that blessed a dead corpse quick
hand that smeared blind spittle into sight
hand that burgeoned bread, smoothed down the rumpled sea
three
he stands laborious
sagging, split,
homo erectus, poor bare forked thing
hung on nails like a picture
he is not beautiful
blood sweats from him in rain
far off where we are lost, desert dry
thunder begins its quiet roar
the first drops startle us alive
the cloud no bigger
than a man’s hand
Real
Today is Good Friday, a day to remember Jesus’ sacrifice for us.
We have no trouble visualising the “Jesus as God” part of the equation – there are so many paintings across the ages that give an ethereal depiction – but we sometimes find it harder to remember the human side of Jesus. He was fully God, but also fully Man, able to identify with us and reconcile us to God. He is not remote – He knows our weaknesses, and has compassion for our frailties.
I came across this song recently, and thought it was a reminder of the man Jesus – the one who had a real, flesh and blood body, who lived a real life and took on real suffering for us, bled real blood for us, who had a real mother he loved as a son.
Real pain.
Real blood.
Real love.
For us.
Perhaps we gloss over the real story because it’s easier to distance ourselves; to not have to engage our emotions or think about what it really means for us.
If tradition is right, both about Mary’s age when Jesus was born, and Jesus’ age at his crucifixion, I am now about the same age she would have been when she watched her little boy die, in blood and pain.
I don’t know how I could have handled that. But it makes it seem more real. And it compels a response, one way or another.
1000 Fields of Roses 