It's funny how everything seems really clear in the shower and then I sit down later and try to write them down and it feels like a tangled mess as I try to figure out the best place to start. So letâ??s just jump in and maybe somehow it will sound coherent :-)
The thought I had is this - there will be times in our walk with Christ when God seems absent and it feels like there is little hope (if any at all) that He will intercede in our situation to make it better. I raise this issue because it is Good Friday today and I was thinking about the alternate universe of Narnia and the similar situation there. In that alternate place, Aslan has just been killed and having witnessed it, Susan and Lucy sit by his dead body on the Stone Table. They stayed there with him through the night even though, as Susan said (when Lucy was going to try to heal him using her "Christmas present") - "It's too late. He's gone."
What kept them there by that body through the night was love not hope. They had no hope that Aslan would come back to life but they loved him and that love was not diminished by his "death".
Switch back to our reality and we find those that followed Christ who would be in shock at this time and with very little left of the hope they had placed in Him, still fully expressing their love for Him in spite of the circumstances. They stayed with Him, claimed His body, provided a tomb ... and so on. These things they did not because they thought or hoped that he would be raised to life again in a couple of days, but because they loved Him.
A couple of days later, the women - Mary, Mary and (according to Mark) Salome. Came early in the morning to the tomb fully expecting to still find a body there, but they still came out of love for Him. That love led them to an empty tomb.
I've gone into all of that to make this point - it is our love for Him that is the key to all of our walk as Christians and it is His love for us that makes it possible. Can you still love God when everything seems bleak for you and there seems little hope that He even knows you exist or when you feel that He can't or won't help you out? It is that love that can see us through the dark nights of distress, suffering and death, and bring us through to joyful and hope filled mornings of resurrection.
"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." - 1 Cor. 13:13
Grace and peace,
Deji.
