Author: Michele Minehart (Page 294 of 311)

In the next 12 hours, 2 of my friends will be checking into hospitals. Both will be given unflattering hospital gowns, have an epidural administered and then be told to wait. One will find out if this small cluster of cells that began living in his body long ago is really a disease trying to destroy good, healthy cells. The other friend will see what has become of a small cluster of cells that began living in her body 9 months ago, and he will begin life in our world.

i can’t even describe my emotions. hope, fear, anticipation, frustration, excitement. and complete and utter uselessness.

it’s hard for me to really get my mind and heart around the fact that God is the God of all of this. but He is. David Crowder even sang it…”in joy and pain, in sun and rain, You’re still the same and you never let go.”

my understanding of the Hebrew word for “hope” is a connotation of waiting. so, for the next 12 hours (hopefully less, for Kristen’s sake), i guess that’s what I’ll do.

i’m not sure why, it probably has something to do with bread, but i was randomly wiki-ing passover from the jewish perspective (seeing how it is, well, a jewish holiday). interesting stuff – they have a little yeastbread hunt for the kiddos before passover begins and apparently it falls into spring cleaning. you can’t have even a bit of yeast substance in the house. there’s also the “4 questions” kids ask the adults at the meal so that the story of passover can be retold once again.

on a side note, some interpreters think a better interpretation of pesach would be “to hover over” as in protective sense. i can dig that.

but here’s my quandry. a big deal part of the passover is that you recline to your left during the meal. it’s quite mandatory (and it seems there’s quite the discussion as to if a woman should recline or not), even for kids to recline. so i thought to myself, “what’s going on here?”. more wiki. a little google. it seems that reclining at the table was something kings, or people of importance, did during the meal. servants would never recline. i picture in my mind someone lounging about, having grapes fed to them. and so, as a way of helping the hebrew people remember that they were delivered from a land of slavery into freedom, they would recline like kings at the table.

as i read about this, the verse immediately came to mind that jesus was reclining at the table with his disciples during the passover feast. he was apparently doing what a good jewish boy should do for passover.

but there’s some sort of delicious irony in the fact that jesus really WAS a king, lounging with a bunch of don’t-quite-get-it followers for passover. like he “let” them lounge with him and enjoy his status – not that jesus was a status seeker.

i can’t quite put my finger on it… but something speaks. something fits.

i think that’s probably the excuse of the roman soldiers who arrested and subsequently crucified Jesus. that’s what they do. everyone knows that a soldier of the world’s superpower has to do a few dirty jobs, and crucifixion is part of the deal. but i just have to wonder if they knew… i believe that one gospel puts it that after Christ’s death one remarked “surely this man was the son of God.” but it was his hands that held him to the cross…

we’re probably not all the different. how many times do we do things that would shame jesus because “that’s my job”?… ethics comes to mind, but probably even more prevalent is the habit of overworking. feeling as if the business will collapse if i don’t put in 60 hours this week. without blabbering on and on in explanation, that’s just a socially acceptable way of making yourself god. the idea that nothing will go right without you… what a way of replacing your need for God.

where the roman soldier got it wrong was that it was just his job. he was first and foremost a child of God, employed by the state of rome. we do the same thing. we are not what we do. but in a society such as that which we live, we begin to believe that it’s true.