Lenten Prayer

I found the following poem on a slip of paper in a book, after my mother died. It was in her handwriting, but she wasn't the author. It has no title, either. I haven't been able to trace its origin anywhere as yet. The punctuation is partly mine, since several lines ended in the handwritten version without any. 

Lord, there is so much in me

That other people cannot see,

My weakness and my secret pride,

The sins that fester deep inside,

The idleness that seeks to shirk

The drudgery of dreary work.

The thoughts that wander when I pray

Like witless sheep that go astray.

The self-indulgence of a mind

To dreamy reverie inclined.

The part that hurries overmuch

And tarries not to feel Thy touch.

The part that speaks of me and mine

And not enough of Thee and Thine.

Every Lent I say this prayer

Lord bless and help me to prepare

A soul more fit to sing Thy praise

When come the holy Easter Days.

The intermediate hope

The intermediate hope -- the things that happen in the present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day -- are always surprising because, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present ... is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope

Easter is Always coming...

Something slightly different today - I was alerted to this video by Bosco Peters, one of the most energetic users of social media in New Zealand.  As he says, it's a bit late, because it relates to 'Easter coming', but it's powerfully-wrought piece, and very cleverly put together.  

God's new creation

With Easter, God's new creation is launched upon a surprised world, pointing ahead to the renewal, the redemption, the rebirth of the entire creation.... every act of love, every deed done in Christ and by the Spirit, every work of true creativity -- doing justice, making peace, healing families, resisting temptation, seeking and winning true freedom -- is an earthly event in a long history of things that implement Jesus's own resurrection and anticipate the final new creation and act as signposts of hope.

N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope