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Monday, March 09, 2009

On Being Found

We listened to a tremendous (as usual) Tim Keller sermon as a team last night, based on John 20:11-18, the passage where Mary comes to the empty tomb. As he points out in the sermon, Mary is weeping, lost, bewildered, and thinks she has been abandoned. She is aggressively ready to fight for the missing body in spite of her grief. But in reality she has just seen two angels, she is walking through the scene of the greatest miracle of all time, and she is speaking to the Lord. It is not until Jesus calls her name that her eyes are opened to reality. Mary. Just that word, and the entire scene for her changes. Instead of despairingly pleading to fix the burial/spice/location-of-the-body problem . . she is suddenly clinging so tightly to her friend Jesus that he has to tell her to let go!

How much of our lives to we miss? What looks like a bleak road or a disastrous outcome, like loneliness or opposition, may turn out to be the presence of Jesus. Our expectations blur our perception of reality. Grasping for what we think we need, or for what we sense to be our role, we may be missing the whole picture. Like Job and his so- called friends, we completely miss the reality of what is happening, because we assume God to be small or absent, we misread the signs, we operate in the wrong context.

May we all hear our name spoken in love, know who we are and where we are, have the veil rent to see the truth of God's unassuming and gentle walk into our lives. May we be, like Mary, called by grace.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a blessing your blog is to me today. Thank you God for Jennifer. May God give you strength to carry on in the wonderful testimony of your work. Judy in HMB

Anonymous said...

I'm a highschooler in North Carolina, and my Mom likes to read your blog and introduced me to it.I just wanted to thank you for your blog, and especially for this particular post today. I was having a hard day today. To be honest, I was feeling sorry for myself.Your post really helped to put me back into perspective. I pray that God will continue to give you encouragement and hope.
Audrey W.

Anonymous said...

Hello,

I'm Solomon King from Node Six.

I've added your blog to the Ugandan Blog feed aggregator that Node Six is working on.

It's called BlogSpirit.

The current version is at http://www.nodesix.net/blogspirit

Drop by some time and see what other Uganda[n] Bloggers are saying.

Solomon King,
nodesix.com

My personal blog - rogueking.com