What did Jesus believe?  And when did he believe it?

Theologians have emphasized that Jesus is God,    Whatever that means.  To me anything worth calling God is way beyond our tiny human minds. And focusing on Jesus being God obscures the fact that his life and death is the prototype of our spiritual journey and the source of grace for it.  Jesus started out believing he was here just for his own people and in the beginning, he was focused on teaching. But step by step God challenged him to also love through meeting the human physical needs of lepers, Samaritan heretics, hungry multitudes, fallen women, and even a soldier of the hated conquerors.  On the cross he actually forgave his own religious leaders who had bullied the Romans into torturing and killing him. And finally, he even chose to trust God when he felt that God had forsaken him.

This is not just the WAY of Jesus.  It isalso our WAY as his followers.

At thirty, I took the risk of asking Jesus to not only be my spiritual Savior, but the Lord of my life. It turned out that letting Jesus be Lord takes a lifetime. First, I experienced that incredible Love of God that was fleshed out in Jesus. Then I began to recognize small miracles in my everyday life and later I even witnessed large miracles of healing. But then, I wept for my tiny child who suffered physically for his first four years of life before having a miracle of healing.  But finally, I watched my mother die by inches over fourteen years of Alzheimer’s.

After seven years we had to put my mother in a nursing home though I had promised myself that I never would. I was Director of Religious Education for the Chaplains Division at Fort Campbell and driving home on the next Sunday, I was furious at a God who could do miracles but didn’t for my mother.  When I got onto the first country road, I saw people going into a tiny church and I thought of joining them. But since all the people were black, I felt like I might be intruding, so I drove on as it began to drizzle.  Soon I passed an elderly black man dressed in his Sunday “go to meeting suit” walking toward the church.  I turned back and offered him a ride. When we reached the church, he invited me to join them, so I did. What stood out for me from that service was a song they sang about trusting that someday they would understand their suffering. It hit me that black people had to trust for more than two hundred years. It gave me some perspective. But seven years later when my mother died after being comatose for more than a year, I was waiting in my car for a friend and mentally yelling “Why! Why! Why!” at God again. Finally, needing a distraction, I decided to go into a shop there. When I walked in, the first thing that caught my eye was a card with these words in bright colors, “There is no sorrow on earth that heaven cannot heal.” God is in the timing. Faith is the conviction that God can heal, praying that he will, thanking when he does, but ultimately it’s about trusting God