21. 03.
From Gene Edwards’ The Divine Romance:
The soldiers bound the Lord’s legs, pressed them hard against the wood, and nailed his feet to the cross. Ruthlessly they pulled the stake upward, balanced it, and then plunged it into a waiting hole. There was an awful thud and a pathetic groan.
Overhead the heavens were growing dark with some sick and mysterious cloud. Every moment the sky grew darker and more foreboding. Citizens of earth clutched their garments about them and shook inside at the sight of the foulness gathering in the sky above them. What they saw were but small drops of vast, unholy things seeping through from unseen realms.
The angels were now on the darkest and most dreadful of their journeys. Across time and space they flew, into every year, hour, and minute of human history. Into every village, town, and city. Across plain and desert, down even into the seas, they plunged. Rising, they brought back their dreadful cargo to Jerusalem, careful to stay in the invisible, that they not drown earth with the very stench of their black wares.
Darker and thicker grew the massive thing, as numberless angels wrestled to endure their burden until the appointed moment.
The Lord of earth grew faint upon his cross. His time was at an end.
With groans and wails and agonizing cries, the angels lifted their foul booty, stepped into time, and rushed up Golgotha’s hill, carrying with them every sin of every man and woman who had ever lived!
Bringing together into one place this vile, pulsating, living thing called sin, thy cast it all into the Lamb of God – who now became sin incarnate. All sin was now accumulated in one place – in him. Divinity now experienced that one thing it had never known. In the flood of that indescribably hideous invasion, the Lord of glory, forsaken of all holiness, cried out in delirium,
My God, my God,
Why hast thou forsaken me?
21. 03.
Many things – such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unafectedly – are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
- C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
I would add to that: humility. In fact, I would suggest humility is the perfect example of working against your goal when you try hard to achieve it.
Humility is such a difficult attribute to work towards, because when I am working towards humility, I am most often going to end up taking one step forward and two steps back. Rather than trying to achieve humility, I must forget about it completely.
Instead, I should do my best to honor the fellow man and woman: my wife and children, church family, parents, siblings, the elderly, the sick and lonely, etc. By honoring them, and I mean truly and sincerely honoring them, I, and most likely without realizing it, develop humility.
The trouble comes when I begin to recognize my own state of humility…
17. 03.
God does not, by the instant gift of His Spirit, make us always feel right, desire good, love purity, aspire after Him and His Will. Therefore either He will not, or He cannot. If He will not, it must be because it would not be well to do so. If He cannot, then he would not if He could… The truth is: He wants to make us in His own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil.
In times of spiritual dryness, when I don’t feel like acting christian, I am under the impression that God has removed Himself from me. However, I don’t think dryness is something that is a result of God leaving me or me leaving God. My understanding is that dryness is allowed by God and is a result of emotional instability that is part of humanness. God could disallow dryness in a faithful followers, but, just as MacDonald states, disallowing dryness would be contrary to the purpose of human will, which is very clearly an important characteristic of the Creation.
William Knelsen