His name was Pete, and he had beef stew all dripping down his white beard, and sunglasses covering his eyes. He was mysterious in his speech, immediately bringing me into a gospel story, and beginning to probe me with questions:
"Jesus said Lazarus was sleeping before he was brought back to life. Do you think he was dead or sleeping?"
Me: "well if he was truly dead, that would mean he was resurrected. If he wasn't, then he was only rescusitated."
-"says who?"
"well, medicine i guess."
-"How do you know there's a difference?"
"Well maybe in the way Jesus meant it, there isn't. But I do believe we'll all be resurrected one day. "
He pointed to thgraphic on my Tshirt. "What's that, one of those rubix cubes? Can you do one in 2 minutes?"
"Not quite that fast I don't think."
He pointed again. "It's just like that puzzle. And we're trying to figure out which side to start with, and how to get the yellows with the yellows and the blues with the blues and the reds with the reds."
Then, referring to the Bible, he remarked, "It's hard when you can't be sure of anything."
Me: "well we can be secure in some things."
"Like what?" He asked, with a marked curiousity that was difficult to distinguish as genuine or feigned.
"We know that Jesus is coming back to fix everything that's broken, including us," I answered.
"And how do you think he's going to do that?"
"By conquering Death."
"Ahhhhh," he said, smiling to himself. "The sleeping kind of death?...or spiritual death?
well, both I suppose, at the same time.
He smiled and said a few more words and then left, as abruptly as he came.
Soon I moved on to get my weekly sermon from Derek. Yet this time he was looking to me for counsel:
"How do I do it, I mean REEEEAALLY live for Him. with EVERYTHING I am? How do I do it?"
I was shocked to hear him asking me this. I consider him to be the authority on faithfulness. The spiritual side of him never seems to shut off. All day long, he asks and seeks and tells, and whispers: God is alive, God is alive.
"I don't know the answer Derek. I know that grace is a big part of it. Just as we can't love others without grace, we can't love Him without grace. We must ask Him to make us desire Him more. Praying for this is a good place to be."
He kept going on: "But how do I really live for Him? there's just so much temptation."
In the distance, behind Derek, a man, tall and lanky with short dark hair, and shadowy eyebrows was meandering accross the common with a stack of pamphlets in his hand. Slunkily drifting from person to person, not saying a word. But reaching out his hand to offer the words on paper: "I was blind but now I see", written in bold and tiny print at the top. People took them un-alarmedly, and kept walking.
What does it mean to love others? what does Grace look like? Grace that's not cheap, or shy, or made of paper? Grace that's alive, in you and me.
What does it mean to live in hope of the resurrection? As we move hesitantly and confused between life and death, do we know- and REALLY live as if we know- that the cycle will one day be transformed?
I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. -Philippians 3:10-11
