A Week Very Worth Remembering

Holy Week is a week like no other.  When I really think about the fact that the savior of the world died on a cross for me, it becomes clear to me that I haven’t been soaking that in as much as I should.

Jesus can never be celebrated enough, but this year, I saw Holy Week celebrated like I’d never seen before.

Ash Wednesday started our festivities with a Bible study about the Passover.

During that Bible study, God gave me the idea of how to celebrate the next day.  Someone on my squad had said something about how Jesus kind of ‘saved the best for last’ of people sinning against Him.  He had spent His whole life being disgraced and rejected by the people He encountered.  That all lead up to being handed over to death by one of His closest friends, denied by another, and abandoned by the rest them.  That’s where the idea came in.

The next day, I started reading John to try to soak in the weight of Jesus’ choice to go to the cross for mankind, that treated Him so terribly.  As I read through the Gospel, every time it talked about someone sinning against Jesus, or people’s disbelief in Him, or the pain He endured, I wrote “still worth it” in the margins.  I read about plots to kill Jesus, lies about who He is, and countless miracles that weren’t enough for people to believe.  Even more, John was written about a very short window of time and a very small sample of people.  That kind of hatred extends far beyond that sample in every way.  It extends past and future, across the earth, and in every person- in some way, shape, or form.

He knew all of that the whole time and He still chose the cross.  He didn’t face that decision after the pain of rejection had worn off.  Every time people disrespected Him and in the freshness of every wound, He was choosing the cross.  He knew his crucifixion was coming and He still said that we were worth it.  I know I’ll never be able to fully wrap my head around that fact, but I also know I should never stop trying.  That practice definitely helped me better appreciate the upcoming days.

Later that night, our squad washed each other’s feet and took communion, which meant more to me as I felt the weight of what Jesus did for me in a deeper way.

Then, what really hit me on Good Friday was a chapter of The Case For Christ.  Every year, our squad’s mentor reads the chapter that talks about Jesus’ crucifixion.  It’s rather vivid, but I would absolutely recommend reading it and soaking it in.  It explains in quite a bit of detail the suffering that Jesus experienced in the process of being tortured and crucified.  It’s hard to read that and not be incredibly thankful, knowing that He did that in my place.

Next comes Black Saturday.  I didn’t even know Black Saturday had a name, but as the day the world was left in darkness, it was a day of lost hope.  Jesus was actually dead.  People didn’t understand Him when He said He’d rise, so they thought it was over.  They thought the people were right in that following Jesus was a waste.  They thought everything was lost.

One way I saw this day remembered was in prayer.  One of my teammates had been asking God to break her heart for what breaks His, so she spent the day praying for those things.

But ultimately knowing that even when all seems lost, there is hope.

Because JESUS IS RISEN!!

Easter was a day full of worship and celebration.  I queued songs to celebrate that “It Is Finished”! “The Lamb of God”, “Jesus, Paid It All” with “Me On [His] Mind”.  We had a sunrise worship service at base and visited a local church that went wild. It was a party.  Jesus is alive!  What a cause for celebration.