Our Daily Bread

No element in the Easter story is more troubling to unbelievers than the report that the followers of Jesus found the tomb empty that Sunday morning.

Two roses were on the Communion table in our church on Easter Sunday morning. As I looked at them, my heart was filled with joy.

The cross. We see it today as the rough, wooden instrument of death for Jesus Christ.

Our neighbor was startled when two young men walked into her home uninvited. She screamed. Fortunately, they ran. Yet no one would accuse her of failing to be hospitable. When you enter someone’s house, you come in on that person’s terms.

As a memento of a retreat I attended, I was given a small towel with a hand-stitched design symbolizing Jesus washing His disciples’ feet. That towel served mostly as a decoration for a few years until one of my daughters accidentally used it to clean the car. The commemorative towel has been scrubbed with stain remover and sent through the washer, but it’s indelibly marked by grease and grime.

The couplet “If the laws of the kingdom you faithfully keep, health, riches, and honor you surely will reap” sums up what many today are teaching. But it’s not true! Multitudes of faithful believers are sick or poor or persecuted. Yet they gratefully worship the Lord, serve Him the best they can, and remain joyful. They can do this because they believe the law of the cross—that by dying to self we produce a spiritual harvest that will last forever.

When devotional writer Aletha Lindstrom needs a lift for her spirits, she thinks of her favorite poetry book title, Who Tells The Crocuses It’s Spring? That prompts her to ask other questions like, “Who makes the trees turn all those beautiful colors in the autumn? Who splashes rain in shining puddles? Who makes the stars shimmer in the night?”

During a Sunday evening church service, the children’s minister brought two boys and two girls, ages 6 through 8, to the platform. First he asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. They said athlete, policeman, farmer, and missionary.

Parades have long been used as celebrations of great achievements. In American history, the greatest parades focused on people such as pilot Charles Lindbergh, the Apollo 11 astronauts, and war heroes. These celebrations were marked by ticker-tape showers and adoring crowds lining the streets of a major city as bands and celebrities passed in review.

Purim is one of the most unusual of the Jewish feast days. It was instituted to celebrate the death of Haman and the escape of the Jews. Today it is marked by reading the book of Esther (interrupted by raucous noisemakers whenever Haman’s name is read) amid a party atmosphere.