Dona's Blog

Metastatic breast cancer is a serious chronic disease that can’t be cured and is nearly always fatal. I am hoping for the miraculous and whether that comes through medical research or from Divine intervention I will be shouting hallelujah!!!

The disease, like many diseases, forces life changing limitations that tempt many to disbelieve in a good God. But not all will go that path. There has been and will be those who will find their limitations wooing them to trust in a God who loves them.
I understand that for some skeptics, faith in God is a crutch. I disagree. Faith is not a crutch, it is a rescue gurney – a Stokes litter, an essential for which I need not apologize. A crutch would never carry the weight of my greatest limitation: a finite mind and troubled soul unable to locate the peace and joy I long for.

Today is Good Friday, the calendar day that Christians have honored for centuries. This is the historical transcendent event that provided rescue gurneys for all who would humble themselves to be carried. The story of a paralyzed man on an actual rescue litter in Luke 5:17-49 is worth a look as a way of testing what I’m about to write.

A paralyzed man is so helpless that his friends lower him on a gurney through a torn-out roof top to put him before Jesus. His good friends went to this extreme because the crowd around Jesus was impenetrable. The moment arrives when friends and the crowd anticipate a healing miracle by Jesus.
But, Jesus does the unexpected. He pronounces the man’s sins forgiven, sending a shock wave among the religious whose theological understanding would see this statement as blasphemous, because, as they said, “Who but God can forgive sins?” Jesus, knowing their thoughts, challenges their thinking and hardness of heart. Jesus points to our greatest limitation, the disruption of our relationship with God through lack of love for Him which will eventually challenge our ability to love others, especially the unlovable. Then he gives the man the physical healing of mobility.

Good Friday celebrates the day of Christ’s crucifixion. Why are Christians “celebrating” such a tortuous event; decried by skeptics as morbid? But this horrific offense is not what we celebrate. We celebrate with somber reverence the display of extravagant grace and costly love done by the only one who could forgive sins, our greatest limitation.

So Happy Easter, dear friends. We have this hope. As Paul said , in talking about our mortality, “we do not grieve like the rest of humankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and arose again.”