What if.......

"If I make my bed in hell,

even there,

You Are With Me."

-Psalm 139:8

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What if

God So Loved,

So Much so,

That He could not bear

To see His beloved suffer death's agonies alone

To stand by while we endured

the soul carving crucifixions

to which we are

so often subjected

in this fallen world...

felled by our own hands...

He begged us choose life

we chose death,

He offered Deity

We chose the Deceiver,

He gave us a Garden

We chose Gethsemane...

He could've turned away, as a lesser god would,

He could've abandoned us to the crucifying consequences,

Dismissed us out of Hand forever...

But Instead,

Instead,

He laid open His Hands

to the pounding of nails,

Laid open His faithful heart

to the risk of further rejection

He traded His throne for thorns,

His comfort for a cross,

He laid aside Heaven

and stepped into our hell...

Determined if that's where we decided to make our bed

He would lie down,

even there,

with us...

We quote, by rote,

the too familiar words,

"If we are joined in His death,

we shall also partake of His life..."

Forgetting,

I think,

that it is not we,

in some show of self-righteous piety,

who join Him,

Rather it was He,

in a show of unfathomable Passion,

Who joined us...

Who joins us still...

 Whose joining rejoins us 

to Heaven

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"  For if we are one with Him [permanently united] in the likeness of His death, we will also certainly be [one with Him and share fully] in the likeness of His resurrection."

-Romans 6:5

Segues, Seeds, and Seasons, a reprise

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Seasons do eventually change no matter how endless things may feel, whether we desperately want things to stay the same
or whether we're waiting with bated breath for something new...

It is the nature of things, the way of life,
ever evolving...

Sometimes we defy the transition so stubbornly, like a toddler throwing a tantrum when her parents insist on throwing out some favored but now ill-fitting garment, with no understanding that something newer, better, and much more comfortable is in the making and forthcoming. With that same futility and short-sightedness we hold on to bygone seasons with a mental vicegrip even after the season has grown old or stale or has ended all together, but, as my Mom use to say, "It doesn't matter if you wear your galoshes in the Summer, Honey, it isn't gonna make the Spring stay." We need to trust that as much as we loved the garment of the time gone by, however familiar and comfortable it was, there is something better in the making. Something that will fit our evolving life and that will foster further growth.

Of necessity the prior seasons that coddled us and were conducive to our growth must fall away to make possible the new life. But leaving these confines is not always easy, the space that felt so manageable, so secure, like a butterfly's cocoon. The transition, while natural, can be traumatic. It's so easy to feel disillusioned during these segues. We are uprooted from the old, but not quite yet rooted in the new. We are waiting to find our footing and even when we finally do, the new land can feel so foreign and we go through nothing less than culture-shock as we venture forward. New beginnings are rarely wrapped up pretty with a bow on top, but rather tend to be trademarked by screaming babies, shattered seeds, civil wars and the like.

During a devastating time of agonizing uncertainty in author Elisabeth Elliot's life, she recorded an instance where, completely distraught and disoriented, not knowing which way was up, she ran out to her back yard, sunk onto her knees and cried out to God for answers...The answer came...in the form of an acorn.

Her eyes fell on the little seed beneath her and the words that flooded her mind were these...

"When the acorn falls and is buried, all it knows is the falling and the darkness and the dying; it has no idea of the oak tree that's going to come out of it's life. If it did, the death would seem insignificant, and instead of fear there would be joyful abandonment into My plan. Look at the acorn and trust Me."

Perhaps it's time to let go of the crumbling scaffolding of past seasons...allow what has died to be buried, so that new life can come, so that we can see when it comes...

...it will surely come.

Look at the acorn and trust Me.

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"Behold, I do a new thing"

Isaiah 43:19