There’s a burnt and charred Cross that hangs over my desk.
Like the whole world’s been more than a bit burned after the last couple of years and everyone’s kinda staggering to the foot of the Cross.
Like a whole world of us has come with all the scorched dreams for our people and the torched hopes of our former lives. It been a long couple of years.
I reach out and touch that scorched cross hanging on my wall and that is what we all get. We all get to come.
We get to :
Come with our soot-smeared relationships and the cinders of the story that now won’t ever be.
Come with our scorched stories and seared sins, come with each other and the injustice of all the justice-starved and parched, come with the collective heartbreak of the fragile and fractured, come with the weight of a whole world of bruised and ruined and wrecked.
Come with the incinerated bits of your one smoldering heart.
Come to the Cross because there is nowhere else in the world to go with this lament of all our cremated hopes.
Because in all the world:
“Only the Cross can breathe life across the dying embers of our dreams because
He is working in more ways than it seems.”
Only the Cross is stretched wide open enough to hold and embrace an ache like ours.
Only the Cross can breathe life across the dying embers of our dreams because
He is working in more ways than it seems.
Only the Cross says that what feels like darkness-at-noon moments can be part of destroying all of the dark.
Only the Cross says what looks wrecked can resurrect.
Only the Cross says that there is a Way through, but it won’t look the way we’d thought, but in every one of His ways, He’s working in countless other ways. Trust all of His ways.
“Good Friday doesn’t just change our own story — Good Friday changes the whole world.“
And Good Friday says believe in the better mysteries:
Believe death killed death.
And the born can be reborn.
Sin can be consumed by Love,
Debt can be erased by Grace,
And The Nailed One can nail it, kill it and resurrect all of it better than our wildest dreams because His new Kingdom right now is defeating any of evil’s venom.
Because only this King, on this Cross, can become the lever that turns the cosmic axis of this world and our lost souls right around and begin a revolution.
Good Friday doesn’t just change our own story — Good Friday changes the whole world.
In a world that desperately needs good news — there is Good Friday and a revolutionary Sunday morning coming with a new world and way of being, and that is the realest news.
The world outside our doors feels charred from all kinds of war and divisiveness and heartbreak and the hardest of years, and through the veil of smoke, this stands, this remains:
The Cross is our only Hope.
On Good Friday morning,
through the searing haze of these days, we see —
really see with the wide open eyes of our heart —
and I reach out to touch that charred Cross over my desk and feel it:
Come to the Cross, come to the passion and love of Christ —
and let the heart ignite with a love that cannot be razed,
our love song to Him rising far higher in a glory blaze of its own.
