Apr 23

Written by:
4/23/2011 8:12 PM 

I've been working for weeks to prepare a new online platform, in response to a very strong intuition (some might call it a "leading") that it is time once again to engage the world.  

As most of us know, maintaining even a simple website like this is much like real work.  It used to be that egotism was enough to keep me at the computer for hours and days on end, fiddling and experimenting and moving things back and forth by a pixel or two until they were just perfect.

No more.  Left to myself, it is most unlikely that I would make the effort in the absence of a payday.

Fortunately I am not left to myself.  There is One greater than I, as John the Baptizer said, Who demands it.

Today in some places and tomorrow here, much of the world celebrates the anniversary of an event even more unlikely than my doing Web work for $0.00.  

It is said that there was a Man Who was killed by professional executioners, and then entombed by other men, "men of respect" -- men with sufficient experience to know a corpse when they saw one -- Who then got up and walked out of His tomb a couple of days later.

You can of course find the whole story in what we now call the New Testament.  For much of my life I regarded that story as a load of wistful, wishful nonsense, believed by people too weak to face the bitter realities of a meaningless universe.

Things change.  Experience teaches.  I changed my mind, or more accurately had it changed for me.  

More detail to come, if God wills it.  For tonight it is enough to say that after thorough investigation and rigorous testing, I am convinced that Jesus son of Joseph the carpenter really did get up and walk away after being dead, dead, dead, as dead as any doornail or ex-parrot.

Since this is the case, the things He said and that His followers have said down through the centuries are worthy of consideration.  What He and they said and wrote is true, and because it is true, it works.  If the Gospel of Jesus Christ didn't work, why on earth would so many people over so long a time decide to live for His sake, rather than their own?  It's not just stupidity and stubbornness and uncritical credulity.  There's more to it than that, as personal experience has demonstrated to me.  

One of the things He said was "Because I live, you will live also."  I have found this to be true even in this present time, and experience has convinced me that it will be true when time is a label without referent.

Thus this website and blog.  There is a point to human existence after all, good and evil are real in fact, and each of us is worth more than we know.

It is worth a few weekends' part-time work to exercise the privilege of communicating that Word.

Happy Easter 2011
--Mike