Holy Week 2009 – Resurrection Sunday – He is risen, he is risen indeed

Greetings Dear Readers,

The sun is not up yet as I write this. It will be shortly. Families will gather today and share a meal. Little kids will hunt for coloured eggs and eat too much candy. Since I found Christ 35 years ago I have always taken Resurrection Sunday seriously. It was my wife Avalon who got me to see the whole week as significant. I miss her terribly this morning. Ironically it was this time last year she told me she was leaving me and that I could do nothing about it.

This has been a year where I have learned much about who I am and who I had become. It is the moment that is about to be that matters. I have realized just how much of my life was not Christ’s but was my trying to live on what I had learned of Christ in the infancy of my reclamation. I had stopped in the journey toward who Christ calls me to be, trying to maintain something instead of continuing to grow. This has hurt my Sons and likely everyone else around me.

Christmas 2007 I had made a realization about just how stagnant my journey toward Christ had become. People I cared for were withdrawing from me and I was focusing on so many wrong things. My brother-in-law said something that set different thinking in motion in my heart and head. I determined to find a way out the mire I had put myself into. I did not know that Avalon had already begun departing.

Last Resurrection Sunday I was so full of pain that I could barely function. This year is different. I know what a crooked stick I am. I see how much I had forgotten how to show grace to others at the level that I need grace from Christ. I realize how often I fail Christ and shudder when people say they want to be like me. I have begun to build friendships with men who are an example to me. I have remembered just how much the world needs me to disappear because I have focused on Christ enough that they only see him.

I have little hope that Avalon will return. I hope that I can save my relationship with my Sons. I know that I can, because of His grace continue to build my relationship with Christ. The sun will rise shortly reminding me that Christ is risen from the dead. That is my only hope. A risen Christ and his grace is all that I have and the only thing in which I can set my store. So I ask you today to look with me to the empty cross and the empty tomb. I ask you to walk with me not because I am great but because I follow one who is great. I will fail you and he will not. Please take the journey not because I am on it but because he is leading it.

Pilgrims to the City of God – Michael Card

Pilgrims of passion,
We follow the One who holds out a cross and a crown
We travel a dark road that has but one Light
For we have here no lasting town
And sometimes we run by the power of His might
On our own at the best we can plod
What we hopefully look for is just beyond sight
We are pilgrims to the City of God
The stigma of strangers lost in a strange land
In a fallen world that's not our home
But we are not just homeless prodigals here
Because we have some place to go
And sometimes we run by the power of His Light
On our own at the best we can plod
What we hopefully look for is just beyond sight
We are pilgrims to the City of God
Pilgrims to the City of God
Behold, you have come to Mount Zion
To the city of the Great King
To thousands and thousands of angels who come
Assemble to joyfully sing, they sing
And sometimes we run by the power of His might
On our own at the best we can plod
What we hopefully look for is just beyond sight
We are pilgrims to the City of God
And sometimes we run by the power of His might
On our own at the best we can plod
What we hopefully look for is just beyond sight
We are pilgrims to the City of God

Wishing you joy in the journey,

Aramis Thorn