1 post tagged “good friday”
March 21st
Good Friday
So I am suddenly weirded out because my living room smells like gardenia. And gardenia is my favorite flower. And our bush out front only blooms in the middle of summer. But I tell you, the room reeks of gardenia (in a good way).
This week has been an out of body experience. Or I should say an out of mind experience, because my body has definitely been a part of every moment of the past four days. I got my tonsils removed on Tuesday. After plenty of doctors and friends alike warning me of the two hellish weeks of pain, I welcomed the challenge. No big deal. I have a 'high pain tolerancy', right? So in hindsight, I have to say the pain is bearable, only because it is forgettable to a point. I could sit on this couch (as I have for the majority of the week) and watch tv to my heart's content and have a proud confidence in my body's pain tolerancy until the moment I go to sip/eat/swallow anything. I kid you not. I have lost eight pounds and I am normally a big fan of food.
This afternoon I was suddenly energized, perhaps by a brief sunbath, perhaps the effect of too many syrupy liquids (I'm on a bit of a hummingbird diet), and decided to go to our church's Good Friday 'Experience'. With a stubborn confidence in my ability to be OK I marched out the door in a dress, purely delighted to not be in pajamas anymore. After about thirty minutes of this 'experience' my body alerted me that I was definitely not ready to be outside the house and so I quickly fled the scene in fear of passing out. I also felt weird turning down communion, as if I was hiding some sort of shameful conscience.
I guess tonight I am to have my own Good Friday experience. No prayer room. No juice and cracker. Just doing my best to be honest with God about where I'm at and what I'm capable of. A lot less self-confident.
On the drive home, I saw a middle-aged man walking his German Shepherd. They were along one of the prettier greenbelts in my neighborhood, and as my car approached them, there it was. The thing that all dog owners dread. His dog was 'using the facilities'. Number two, right there in front of me. On the beautiful grass, nonetheless. The man was instantly embarrassed and glanced at his dog with a sorry look of disownership. Now my mind has to be a little twisted on these pain meds, but I saw an image of God in that dog's situation. Try as we may to be followers of Christ, we create little stinky messes on a daily basis and our Father NEVER disowns us. He NEVER looks upon us with shame or regret. He calls us into adoption. He promises to clean us of our sins, our pasts, our lowest moments. He takes complete ownership over us and all that we have done.
I was reminded of an intense moment I had in the prayer room last week. I was sitting in the big chair, just sort of free-writing my thoughts to God and I was suddenly struck with the image of the cross in the center of the room. There, in that neat little well-lit prayer room stood a cross, maybe 6 feet tall. It was covered in pink and yellow Post-it notes. Pray-ers had been guided to write down sins they felt convicted of and to pin them to the cross. Now I don't want to sound cynical about our ways of communicating to God. I absolutely love that we have a prayer room where people can have the opportunity to come clean with their God. But suddenly it wasn't enough. Suddenly I had this vision of our 'Post-it note faith', where every sense of guilt is just a pencil away from gone, and all the sins we commit are neatly stuck to the cross in little pastel rows and columns. What if we were called to carve our sins into these planks of wood? What if it took longer than five minutes? What if we had to carve our names upon the back of our Saviour?
I shared my experience with my Mom the next day and she (like always) had some great wisdom from her experiences with Last Days Ministries. I guess one of the things Keith Green emphasized at his concerts was that revival would only come once people truly realized and owned the depth of their sins. He said that you had to want revival badly enough to be willing to completely die for it. No more convenient, fast-food, online shopping, Wal-mart faith. A faith that is messy and bloody and painful.
It has been a few hours now, and the room no longer smells like gardenias. I have to wonder how a God could love me enough to tuck fragrant little blessings into each of my days. Because without His grace...I am the dog.
"I will not sacrifice that which has cost me nothing." 1 Chronicles 21:24
"The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either
forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty
object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether." C.S. Lewis
