Good Friday

Over the last two months, I have been working part time as a vendor in the Garden Department at Lowe's Home Improvement warehouse. This last week was my first week working full-time at this job. As you may well know, I am a flower child and I love to dig in the dirt. What else could I even want than to dead head flowers, unload racks of beautiful blooming begonia (geraniums, gerbera daisies, hydrangea, etc), and organize the place to look it's very best.

The flip side of this job is not at all pleasant. It also so much parallels with my vocation as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus. I must witness death. As I have mentioned before on this blog, this last year has been one of a lot of death.

I wheeled a whole cart of beautifully bloomed out but dying impatiens into the store yesterday. The truck that brought them to our store was heated and as the carts were taken off the truck and put in very cold, almost freezing (the high temperature yesterday in KC was 41) garden center. Needless to say, these sweet little babies did not do that transition. They immediately looked distressed. I said to Phil, one of my bosses, "should we just put this whole rack back in the place where dead flowers go to die?" Phil said, "no, let's leave them here, maybe they will perk up. We will see what they look like tomorrow." So I replied, "You're going to give them 24 hours and then put them to death on good friday?"

For all of us witnessing the death of a loved one...especially one who is so beautiful and excellent, especially one who did nothing to deserve such pain and agony, Good Friday is both wonderful and scandalous. We know grief. But there is one man who lived such a beautiful life and died such a horrific death that all of history has been changed. Jesus is that man. Right after his death, his followers saw his life and death reflected in these words from Isaiah 53:3, "He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom others hid their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account."

Now, this is good friday. It is good partly because when we look into the eyes of that one who suffered and died, we know that all of us have to die. We know that no one escapes death. Not one of us can escape grief. When we grieve, we are connected in a special way to this man of sorrow and grief.