#MY MORNING REFLECTION HOW TO#

He is the Lord of the living and the dead. The layers of protection we use to shield what we’re really feeling. These could be our old way of presenting ourselves to others. In tomb time, we need to unwrap the burial cloths. We need time to make sense of our own new, resurrection life. We need time to process this new way of life and this new way of relating to another. As human beings, we just can’t give it over to God and move on. The second step is we must enter the tomb. These don’t have to be grand gestures, but small acts of forgiving, uniting our suffering with Christ on the cross, or letting go of our desire to control a particular person or situation. For resurrection to happen, something must die. We need to be crucified in Christ so that Christ lives in us, the Christ that cannot die. We need to give God our pain, our betrayals, and our denials.Īnother way of saying this is that we need to die to self. Jesus stayed on the cross until he said, “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit.” We too will likewise stay stuck in Good Friday until we surrender to God. Two, we have to spend some time in the tomb. How do we move our life from Good Friday to Easter Sunday? We follow the path that Jesus took, distilled down into two steps. I’d venture to say we would much rather be resurrection people, not Good Friday people. They would boldly proclaim with both their words and their actions, “He lives!” And because He lives, I now live. Their lives were filled with mystery, not drudgery. What did these people of the resurrection feel? The gospels said joy, amazement, puzzlement, awe, and even a little fear at what wonderous thing God might do next. They realized God had just done the impossible.

#MY MORNING REFLECTION HOW TO#

We’ve forgotten how to live like resurrection people.

We can relate to the emotions of the disciples at the foot of the cross: despair, discouragement, hopelessness, and grief over what’s been lost. Our unwillingness to forgive, to let go, to surrender, and our thirst for revenge. The most powerful force nailing us to the cross might just be our own ego.

They could be an overbearing boss, a health care system that doesn’t care, persistent pain, or our own habits and additions. Most of us have also felt trapped, nailed to a cross by powerful, inescapable forces.

We live our life under the cloud of these experiences. Most of us here have been betrayed by a friend or felt the pain of being falsely accused. On Good Friday, Jesus was betrayed, falsely accused, scourged, and crucified. We are very familiar with the range of emotions and events of Good Friday. We live like Good Friday people, not Easter Sunday people. Instead of living out the Easter mystery with resurrection lives, we sometimes get stuck in Good Friday. It reminds us that maybe, just maybe, God has the power to conquer all the forces that are sapping our life.īut. There is something about this story that touches the deepest part of our humanity. We are meant to be living resurrection lives.

The passion, death, and resurrection is our story. It’s because the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus is not just a story of something that happened 2,000 years ago. So why, year after year, do we return like salmon swimming upstream to find their primordial nesting grounds? What draws us to this particular feast? We know the story. Christians all over the world gather to celebrate Easter.

My morning reflection