Pick up your mat and walk

So the sun keeps on shinning and I can't even believe its radiance.  The warmth encircling and beckoning, inviting us into its healing presence.  And I feel warmed all over, even in the deepest parts of me. 

And the Holy week is here.  That hallowed week.  And the 40 days, the days that at first seemed like an eternity, are coming to their close.  And part of me is so ready to burst into the new life, to let Christ be risen in my life in places where I've never let him live, and the other part of me clings to the safety of this cocoon, to the safety of this exile.

As I sit in my chair, with my candles lit, drinking my coffee and soaking up the warm, life-giving rays, I hear the phrase: "pick up your mat and walk". And it echos over and over in the caves of my heart.

And I think about how sometimes we prefer the comfort and the known of being wounded.  How we get our identity from our pain and so when Christ comes and invites us to "get up and walk", we get scared, we become afraid. We become afraid because everything is about to change.  And the unknown, no matter how wonderful, feels scary because we seem to lose a sense of our barrings a sense of ourselves. 

"I must become less, and Christ must become greater".

And so we enter our own kind of deaths, we let go of the control.  We die to self so that Christ can live more. And then, then we pick up or mat and we walk.  And we walk even when we don't know the way, because he does.  The one who walked into the pit of hell, who stared death right in the eyes and said "enough". "enough death, you don't have the victory here". And he marched right back to this messy broken earth, to this land of the living, where he breathed his life all over us.

And so when the one you are walking with has done all that, you really don't have anything to fear besides him. 

So today, I pick up my mat and I take his hand, which is outstretched to me, and I walk.  I walk with him, knowing that when he calls me out of death and into life, into healing, into freedom, I can go with boldness and confidence. 

Take his hand, you won't be disappointed.