purpose to melody

I've been outside so much this weekend. The weather is great.

I played softball yesterday, and today. I miss it. Even though I'm not very good, I think I'm getting better.

I tried out my new running thing that I think I'll be working on from now. If I can wake up my lazy self to run before school.

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Outreach was quite different than it was the previous times, as I expected. I didn't know what would be different, but I knew that something would have changed from the last time I did it. I know that I changed as a person since that last time.
We went out and stared doing the survey on Easter, and most people were just ignoring us and didn't go past the survey, like we expected. We came up to this one gentleman who was just sitting in the square eating cheese and crackers, and he was okay to do the survey. We kind of got the sense that he knew something about Jesus, but that he might not have the whole picture. So somehow(I forget how) we eventually sat down with him, and he was being very honest and open with us, telling us about how he was brought up in church, and abandoned his faith as a teenager until his mom died last year and he began to take up religion again. He was telling us about how he was just trying to live right, and that he thought very highly of Jesus. He kept going on and on about how great Jesus was, but he said that he was just trying to learn more and more about Jesus, and spent his own personal time thanking God for his life and just living right with himself. So we tried our best to encourage him and try to answer the questions he had, and he was a little taken back by how young we were, and that we were in the place that we were in our lives with our connection with God. He was 53, and he was just a guy trying to make it like we all are, but he said something that I don't hear from a lot of people. He said he didn't fear anything, and that it didn't matter what anyone said or did to him. He said that he feared nothing on earth, because the worst that anyone could do was kill him, and then they couldn't do anything else to him. But he did say that he did fear what was beyond, and how Christ could condemn him or send him to heaven, and that's when I noticed that he hadn't said anything about assurance or what his motivation was for living the way he wanted to(just for him to be right with God and to be 'good'), so we asked him that question, but he said he was just trying to learn. He asked us to share with him how we got to where we are, and he was just so surprised with us and I guess he was happy to see how we had turned out. He left us with telling us that before his mom died, she had always said to him that God works in mysterious ways. And he thought that the two of us coming to sit down and have a conversation with him while he was just sitting there was just amazing. And I do believe that God worked in a very mysterious, yet wonderful way in his life, and also our(my partner and I) lives at that moment. We prayed with him and encouraged him to learn more and to continue to read his Bible and search for a relationship with God. Totally unexpected.

So we didn't convert anyone. We didn't get to share the gospel with everyone we met. We only spoke to a few who weren't insanely rude. But I think this is just like Senegal, just planting the seeds, and maybe one day, they'll think back, or someone else will talk to them, or something else will happen, and we'll all be a part of that.

Missions for me has just come alive, and I've just seen a whole new side of it. Someone talked to me last night, and I was telling him about how I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. He told me to just jump right in there, and just listen to God. If you could put my life priorities into a bucket of sand, and pour my priorities into a sieve, lately I feel like a lot of things have just fallen through and don't really matter to me as much as they did before. I feel like I can let go of things. And what is left is my relationship with God, and a heart for missions. There are lots of things that shouldn't be there as well, but I feel like those things are slowly going away, and I don't know if it's such a great thing(or maybe it is?) that I'm starting not to put things like school or work or even karate as high on my list anymore, and even after a month back from Senegal, I still feel this fire inside to go somewhere and make a difference.
My relationship with God is still a battle against myself and the things of the flesh, but I think the difference now is that I'm not trying to fight by myself, but I'm learning more and more to depend on God and not let myself fall into the lie that just because I've accepted Christ, I can never lose my salvation. I can't keep living and doing the same things, and just ask for forgiveness and think that it's all good. I don't know if that's something that most everyone struggles with, but I sure know that I do.
I went to the Passion Play this year. It's a big play produced by Queensway Cathedral that's been running for the past 18 years and it's a play about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. I went when I was younger a few times, and I just went this year, and all I can remember was that when Jesus came out of the tomb(complete with fireworks and a loud bang and angels everywhere) all I could think of was that picture on the Evenagecube where Jesus is risen, and how whenever I showed someone the cube I always put emphasis on that, that Jesus not only died, but he rose again. And I guess I never got that when I was a kid. Is there really more to just growing up in Church and a Christian school and being 'saturated' by Christianity your whole life? I think there is, and I'm just beginning to see that now. And I'm glad that I am, and just like I asked that man at Dundas square if he had taken ownership if his mother's faith, I know that I've taken ownership of my parent's, or church's, or school's faith. It's mine now, and it's amazing, even when it doesn't seem that way.


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The Irony of the Cross

Abraham Piper

Colossians 1:20 - “. . . making peace through the blood of his cross . . .”

How did God take evil, despicable people like us and make us acceptable? By the most evil, despicable deed ever committed.

God reconciled sinners to himself through the blood of the cross. Murder is the extent of hatred—we cannot be farther from God than when we murdered him!—yet that is how he made peace with us. We can draw near to God because of the very act that pushed us the farthest away from him.

So God did not just save us from our sin—he saved us with our sin. And he did not just save us with our sin, but with our worst sin. And not just with our worst sin, but with our worst possible sin. And not just with our worst possible sin, but with the worst possible sin!

Our sin in crucifying Christ made our sanctification possible. We are saved by the very thing we need salvation from. So our depravity is not hopeless: We cannot be worse than what the Lord will save, because he has saved us by means of our very worst.

What a blessed, yet sorrowful, irony Good Friday is. And what a mysteriously kind God, who works even the hatred of those who love him for their good!

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