Cup

Easter is approaching.

For all my kids and grandkids, I am already contemplating the Easter dinner, Easter baskets, Easter bunny, and Easter hunt. The same traditions of my own youth.  

I get a little excited. 

Two past years have interrupted the family celebration. So, I’ve not yet incorporated the story of Jesus in this plan with the five grandkids whose ages are one to five.  Literally, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  Yet, I know we are to tell the story and let the children tell their children to pass the story down from generation to generation.

So, if I’m hosting Easter, I want to tell the story. 

But, before the important story of the cross, there’s a part of the story that involves a cup the night before that I’m wrestling with and wanting to tell.

At the Last Supper,  there was bread broken to remember the body of Jesus, and there was also a cup of wine that was given to His disciples to drink from. “This is my blood,” He said.   This was to remember the new agreement, the new covenant, the establishment of the New Testament.  It’s what we are to remember at communion.

So, there’s a cup to remember. 

Then leaving the supper, yet before His crucifixion on the cross, Jesus was anguished and distressed. To His friends, the 12 disciples, He said,  “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.  Stay here and keep watch with me and pray.” 

There was another cup.  

He prayed it to be taken away. Yet, “If this cup cannot be taken away unless I drink it, your will be done.”

This was the cup of suffering.  

It’s the same cup, isn’t it?

I’ve never noticed this before.  

A cup is a vessel of containment, for sure, but it’s also a measurement within that containment.  Length x Width x Height.

Isn’t this the same amount of love He wants us to have the power to understand, “How high, how wide, how long, how deep, His love really is?

This measure was to the point of His death.  So much so, He asked for it to be taken from Him.

What’s more, He then asked His closest friends, 12 disciples, to stay awake and pray for Him while He was experiencing this grief to the point of death.

They fell asleep.

He woke them up.

They fell back asleep.

They did not.  They just COULD NOT fathom the cup either or they would have stayed awake, too.

I imagine it’s going to take stick pictures this year to understand the volume and how high, long, and deep the Love is that took Him to the cross.

In all the Easter traditions and the story of Jesus, I’m thinking about us drawing a new Easter tradition to remember.

A cup.

Matthew 26

Ephesians 3:18

Winter

Can we have a moment of silence?

Pretty sure that this is what the “Winter of Our Discontent” might look like.

With only 3 days until spring, I don’t think I’m being too premature here.  I’m fairly certain that this might be an indication that my little evergreen will likely not ever be a little green. 

Winter did what winters do and snow and freezing temperatures came out to play.  The protective sun moved farther away.  

I don’t know what kind of chance my seedling started with, but it hailed from such a forcible foliage that I thought Jack Frost might not nip at its unsuspecting nose. 

But, here we are.  Or sadly, here we aren’t.

I am not a fan of winter.  Hate might be too strong of a word, but not by much.  I know,  “The stormy wind comes from its chamber and the driving winds bring the cold.  God’s breath sends the ice.”

Yet, what brings me such delight is that winter is just for a season.  

“As long as the earth remains, there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,” says the Lord.

Discontent is only for a season.

So are we.

We’re just short-lived wildflowers.  Grass and flowers…and little evergreens…that wilt, wither and fall away, none of it meant to be here to stay.

The Word of the Lord is not that way.

It conceives new life.

In us.

It is my hope. 

It’s what I pray.

Job 37:9

Genesis 8:22

1 Peter 1:24

Stopped Clock

3:16:18.

If you’re using this clock of mine to tell time, it’s only going to be right 2 times a day.

But, I don’t use it to tell time.  

The intention for the clock was of course to serve as a timekeeper, but it ticked so loudly that I had to remove the batteries.  I couldn’t remove the clock.  I mean, the nail was in the wall.  Its place in the collage had been established.  

It reminds me of another clock without a battery that had been permanently set.  It was for 11:23.  As a gift to my parents when they sold our childhood home, we had a clock permanently set to remind us of all the time we had at 1123.  My childhood residence.

There’s a place for this clock in their new home.  It will always remind us of Cristland.

So, here’s this clock with no purpose.  Its only job is to tell time.  If it can’t do that then what can it do? So, like Mom and Dad’s, I had it set, too. For this clock, the hour hand is positioned on 3.  The minute hand is fixed on 16 and the second hand rests on 18. 

I figure I could repurpose it, so to speak.  

In Ephesians, I have had a momma’s prayer for my children since I started realizing that I could read something from scripture and want it to be true for them.  At the time, it was a prayer for my two girls before I even had a son.  And, then later for him. My son brought home the hanging sign below the clock from Thailand.  It means family.  

The ones for whom I pray Ephesians 3:16-18.

When I look at the clock and I look at the sign below, I know what time it is. 

With new additions to our family, I pray for us all.

“I pray that from His glorious unlimited resources, He will give you mighty inner strength from His Holy Spirit. And I pray that He will be more and more at home in your hearts as you learn to trust in Him.  I pray that your roots may go down deep into the soil of His marvelous love and come to know, as all God’s people should, how wide, how high, how long, and how deep His love really is.”

All the time.

Ephesians 3:16-18

Presidents’ Day

It’s Presidents’ Day.

If I’m being honest, this doesn’t normally mean anything to me except we’ve recently acquired various coins from years of one collector with various presidents on many of them.

Most of their portraits are as tarnished as the Union Pacific RR container they’re in.  There’s also a mason jar of pennies with Abraham Lincoln’s silhouette and dimes with Franklin Roosevelt dated across the ages.

That’s not all.

There’s a Maxwell House Original Roast coffee tin collecting Kennedy half-dollars and an amber plastic vile with no child-resistant option or refills remaining that are full of quarters with George Washington’s profile.  More coins are in a metal-hinged watch case with a solitary $2 bill with the face of Thomas Jefferson on the front.  

There had to have been much patience in the collection of these coins over the years. Save times when the collector dipped into the tarnished vessel for perhaps a phone booth or a known vending machine to be passed.  Maybe a parking meter on any given day.  If that was true, and I’m sure it was, it seems to me the collector just added back to it with what I imagine to be all the end of the day valuables from the pants of this one man’s pockets.  

So, here’s one old container after another old container with one old president after another old president with their face in the collection of dated years of coins.  Yet, what remains the same in each container is one inscription on each coin.

“In God We Trust.”

Our first president, whose face is on the quarter said,  “It is impossible to govern the world without God.  It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly implore His protection and favor.”

Today we are a nation governed under President 47.  But, we are not to put our trust in President 47 or 46 or 45 or 44.  These often end up in portraits and silhouettes in a tarnished vessel.  Our trust was never meant to be in these men.  Our trust isn’t meant to be placed with any mere human who relies on human strength.  We put our trust in the Lord.  

“Blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.”

It is in God we are to trust.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing more valuable. 

Jeremiah 17:5-7