Greetings from Austin Street

Happy Good Friday!  All is well here at 811. I had a pretty rough day yesterday. I was exactly one week since surgery. Pain higher than it had been emotions all over the place and I really missed my Mom. Then the most wonderful thing happened. I received a package in the mail from my Aunt Betty, my Mom’s sister in Indiana. It was a beautiful pink sweater.  I put it on immediately and felt like my Mom was giving me the warmest most wonderful hug. In her later years Mom always hugged me a little longer as if she were trying to engrave in her memory the feeling of her daughter child to take with her forever (I am sure she did that to all of us.). I put on the sweater and kept it on for the rest of the day and put it back on again.  Today was a far better day. no pain, emotions better and it is Good Friday. Good Friday was not good for Jesus, but it was certainly good for us. To get to resurrection morning we have to go through the darkness of Good Friday, the long Holy Saturday and arise to newness of life on Easter morning.

Dear God, tonight we gathered in worship with friends and family in the deathwatch of your Son. How horrible that must have been for You to watch Jesus be so cruelly beaten, abused and unmercifully shamed in front of his family and friends. Tonight Lord, we were transported back to the foot of the cross through music, prayer, scripture and reproaches. We stood at the foot of the cross with friends and family who love your Son for comfort and strength. Thank you for sending your Son into the world—not to condemn the world, but to love the world. May this world be saved through Jesus. I love you Lord Jesus. In Jesus name, amen.

Tonight this writing is not original text but I found it quite profound and wanted to share it with you.

“maybe this is where we need to enter the Good Friday drama, and maybe this is where we need to take our stand; not betraying Jesus, not denying him, not mocking him, not condemning him, not rejecting him, not mocking him, not cursing him, not flogging him, not killing him—but standing there at the foot of the cross with the others who love him…for us, for all our regrets and for all our impossibles, for all that will never be and for all that once was, for all that we can’t make right and for all that we got wrong, for our Judas failures and our Peter denials and our Lazarus griefs…Jesus offers to take the nails, the sharp edge of everything and offer himself because He wanted to, to take us in our wild grief, us in our anger and our disappointment and our wounds and our not-yet-there, us, just as we are, not some improved version of ourselves, but us—He came for us, to hold us, to carry us, to save us.”

                So when our friends ask us how we spent our Good Friday evening we can say, “I was standing at the foot of the cross…

“It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”

John 19: 30

Take joy in this Good Friday and walk humbly through Holy Saturday. Wear comfortable shoes for the journey may be long. Get some sleep. Love you all, Bruce and Gaylene