Passion

Last night, I watched The Passion of the Christ. If you have not seen it, let me first say that it is rated R with good reason: it is filled with violence because of all the persecution that Jesus suffered. There's no way to avoid it and still tell the story of Jesus's sacrifice to the extent that it should be told. If you have seen it, then you know what I am talking about.

Long story short, I cried. Hard. And for a long period of time, too. I was mostly in shock the whole movie until he was up on the cross and the criminals started talking to him, especially when Jesus told the nicer criminal that "today you will be with me in paradise." Tears streamed down my face as he suffered on the cross and as he gave up his spirit and as he was stabbed to make sure he was dead and as Mary held him broken in her arms. I cried to see him whole and new at the end of the movie. I went up into my room and cried for forty minutes after the movie was over, sobbing about how awfully they treated my Savior and how they persecuted my Jesus. I am so in love with him and it hurts me to see how much he was hurt, even though I know and he knew that he had to suffer and die in order to save us all from our sins. It felt like my heart was ripped open, to see my Savior lying beaten and broken in his mother's arms.

Before I watched the movie, I knew Jesus suffered to save us. I knew he went through a lot of pain. I even cried for that reason during Sandblast. But this was different. This was indescribable and unbelievable. It has changed the way I percieve Jesus's death. It's more real to me now.

This brings me to the word "passion." Dictionary.com describes it a couple of ways:

1. The sufferings of Jesus in the period following the Last Supper and including the Crucifixion, as related in the New Testament.
2. Ardent love
3. Boundless enthusiasm
4. An overwhelming emotion

We call Jesus's sufferings the Passion. In this Passion, Jesus had passion for us. He so ardently loved us that he was willing to give up his life to persecution and crucifixion. He was passionate for us, passionate that we would be able to spend eternity in Heaven, passionate that we would be given the chance to live.

Are we going through our lives with passion, like Jesus? Are we willing to stake everything for our faith in him? Or are we just going through the motions?

An awesome day at Woodstock Square

So yesterday, my friends Henry and Emily, my sister Brittany, and I all went to Woodstock Square because we were going to try to spread the word about Student Impact and try to get some new people to come. We had absolutely no clue what we were doing; all we knew was that we were near the park with a bunch of Impact cards in our hands.

We tried handing the cards out to kids in the gazebo, but it turned out extremely awkward, made worse by some things that I said that sounded really strange. Like, "So we were watching you and thought that you guys might like to come to Impact." We were watching you? Um, that doesn't sound creeperish at all...

So we walked through the park, not knowing what to do, feeling pretty down. But then, we came across a woman sitting on a park bench. She had a bunch of Sharpie markers and was writing phrases on rocks, like "Love" and "Pray" and "Faith" and "Kindness" and "Believe." We slowed down and she invited us over to look at them. She explained that she was doing this for a kind of ministry and she also talked about how she was homeless at one point, but what struck us the most was that she said that people need to just be bolder with their faith and keep planting seeds of faith; even though we may not do much, we'll at least plant seeds of faith, and God will take care of the rest.

That was exactly what we needed to hear, and we told her so and explained why we were in the park. She talked to us some more and let each of us close our eyes and pull out a rock from a bag she had. I pulled out one that says "Faith." Later, Henry and Emily paid for a Starbucks gift card for the woman and we gave it to her. After that whole string of events, we had much more success going up to teens and inviting them to Impact.

I just can't believe how awesome God is! I mean, what are the chances that we would cross paths with that woman? God is the one who brought us together; what an amazing day!

Awesomeness and other thoughts

While at the test session for figure skating on Tuesday, I saw something pretty cool that I wanted to comment about. I was waiting for my turn to skate and finally try to test out with the senior freeskate, when I look over my shoulder in the lobby and see a boy sitting with a book open in his lap, his left hand clasped with his mother's right hand beside him, both of their eyes closed. Half a second later I realize that the book is a Bible, and the boy (who looked like he was about twelve or fourteen years old) and his mom were praying about something. I just found it so awesome that they were doing this in such a public place, because you rarely see people just drop everything wherever they are and talk to God without worrying about what everyone else is thinking of them. I wanted to say something to them, but they were deep in prayer, and the next time I looked over at them they were gone. I will always remember that moment, though, more than the feeling of exhilaration when I saw that God helped me pass the test His way (not mine; I would have skated clean but God needed me to fall so that I could retry the two elements I missed and land them with His help and sheer determination).

I had also been thinking about how some people, mainly some guys, say that they absolutely refuse to cry because they see it as a sign of weakness. In fact, one guy I used to be friends with specifically told me that he did not want to appear weak to others, and thus trained himself so that he wouldn't cry at all. I was thinking about that today, and thinking about how strong and mighty God is, and I came to this conclusion: Even though we may try to make ourselves stronger, and even if we succeed in making ourselves stronger and eliminating some of our weakness, we will never be completely rid of our weakness. We will always have some weakness, because compared to God's strength, we are nothing. He is way more powerful than anything, and for that I am not ashamed if I appear weak to others when I cry if He has revealed something to me. In His presence, we can all be completely free.