Greetings, dear ones.
At 3:15pm, the temperature says 23 degrees. Ice has caked everything. I don’t remember slipping around on gravel before. But that’s what we’re doing outside. Conditions are such that our flight has been cancelled—causing a full day delay. I understand that most of the churches cancelled their services this morning too. Oh well. I guess we have more time with family.
I need to go try to finish a project I started with little Nita. Maybe I’ll send a photo later to show it.
Blessings. Love—Ray.
I have to wonder if our familiarity with this account of Jesus’ abuse and suffering kind of robs us of the real ugly horror of the scene. How can anyone read this description of torture while imagining what it was really like and not wince and squirm with a measure of empathetic agony? It’s absolutely horrible!
What’s with these Roman soldiers? They didn’t have any reason to despise or hate Jesus like the Jewish leaders did. It seems that they were just plain rotten, mean, and incredibly cruel people just for the sadistic fun of it.
Couldn’t Father God have come up with a less barbaric and more bearable script for this drama that achieves our salvation from sin than this hard-to-imagine scene of torture?!? It has to be one of the most ugly displays of sin ever known, yet it plays out to provide the most wonderful offer of deliverance from sin ever known. How can it not be the wildest PARADOX this universe has ever known?! Wow!
Hang on this announcement once again and ponder: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21, NIV). I’m sure thankful that our all-knowing Heavenly Father is the Author of this script. I don’t see how it can be otherwise. If I had been consulted in the authoring, I know I would have messed it up with some other approach.