Good Friday - Crossing the Yellow Lines

A few nights ago on tv, we watched a pavement painter create a 3-d drawing of a waterfall. As he was working people walked back and forward across the emerging artwork, some pushing prams, others on their mobiles, still others on their mobiles and pushing prams.

The next door I walked out of Tweed Centro through the undercover carpark where a worker was painting yellow lines on the edge of the foot path. I asked him if anybody had walked across his painting, he answered no, not yet. I recalled for him the tv show and the painters experience. He said, it will happen, people are in their own world and just don't see. We laughed and I moved to cross the road. As I did I was passed by an older gentleman. As I crossed I turned just in time to see the older gentleman walk right across the freshly painted foot path. I caught the eye of the painter and we chuckled.

In our own world is a fair comment on our lives and the experience of Mary outside the time.
Mary saw the empty tomb and was overcome by her personal grief.

Mary was engrossed in her loss, her beloved Rabbi was not only dead, but now his body was missing.

So much so that Mary failed to see possibility of the new day dawning.

Good Friday and Easter Sunday are both a clarion call to widen our worldview, to look wider than ourselves and how we individually and personally feel about what is happening to us, and see others, not as objects, competitors or oppostion, but as ourselves. To recognise that the pain we experience is not special, it is not restricted just to me, it is the pain that every other feels in their own particular way.

Good Friday is the day Jesus joined humanity to share our pain; Easter day is the day when Jesus, calling our names as he did to Mary, calls us to see the new shoots of life, to see that life only ever rises out of pain, and we can only experience life with others if we first share their pain.

How Time Flies!

How time flies! It seems like only yesterday we returned to school and here we are fast approaching Easter and the end of term 1! How does that happen?

Perhaps it is because we live in a world where we can have it all and have it all at the same time and therefore there are no seasons, no down times, no respite from the relentless nature of a consumer driven world. We can buy whatever fruit we like, whenever we like, regardless of whether it is in season in our country. It is in season somewhere. We can shop everyday of the week, go to the gym at 3 in the morning and but hot cross buns the day after Australia Day.

It never stops and neither do we. Lent is a good time to do just that. To stop, look around and assess what our overly full lifestyle is doing to us, and take the time to smell the roses.

Psalm 47:10 reminds us to ‘Be still and remember that I am God’.