The stages of faith are fascinating to me.  At one time I thought having faith or a relationship with God, meant being rid of problems and floating on a cloud above it all.  God’s plan, again, is different than mine.  His sovereign plan for our lives is to grow in faith and growth is painful.  In order to take us deeper into Himself He takes us deeper–more specifically, we don’t feel Him, we can’t see Him and we can’t hear Him.  All our fundamental, elementary, sense-filled faith is being tested in the tomb of everyday, mundane, empty life.  It sounds hopeless and in a way makes me wonder why I’d want to serve a God like that.  But if you think about it, God the Father did not treat His son any better, in fact, it was much worse.

It’s been interesting this year as I’ve come up to Good Friday and soon Easter morning, how my mind has been taken back to 2,000 plus years or so and I’ve thought about what was happening then and tried to really think and dwell on it for a while.  Yesterday, I thought about the last supper, Jesus being tormented and crucified, for seemingly nothing!  Then in the middle of the night I woke several times thinking about the fact that He went through HELL for us, for me!  What He must have been experiencing 2,000 years ago is surreal, unbelievable and astounding to me.  I of course, cannot grasp it.  But it is reality!  Just as sin and our sin nature is reality in our lives.  We can’t understand that either–we don’t even think it’s that bad–most of us would think we didn’t deserve death!  After all, we are basically good–right!?  Sometimes it takes going through the “tomb” of everyday existence trials, joys and sorrows, to grasp a hint of how un-good we are.

The awesome thing is, once we’ve experienced that emptiness, we then are transformed to that higher plain of existence–THY WILL BE DONE, type of existence.  Because we know, deep in our darkest experiences, that Jesus has overcome the world, we have hope of a better existence, and then it moves to confidence that we WILL have a new life because of Jesus’ experience in Hell and the tomb for us.  Tomorrow–(It’s not yet Easter morning)