The disciples saw Jesus do many other miraculous signs in addition to the ones recorded in this book. But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in him you will have life by the power of his name. (John 20:30-31)
It was upsetting when the first grey hair appeared. I suppose that I should not have been surprised since I was older than most when it showed up. Still, that grey hair was a sign of growing old, a sign that I did not welcome. Youth is where things are at. The people in the images I see online, in apps or on TV are usually young. Not so great when you are old-er.
The temptation, of course, is to cover up that grey, fill in that wrinkle and somehow flatten that uncooperative belly. But that only masks the problem. Hiding behind those signs of aging is the shadow of death. No one likes to even think of death, so we try to pretend that death doesn’t live in our neighborhood. That, of course, is not true and the energy required to keep up this pretense exhausts us. But the real problem with denying death is that it denies us of the preciousness of life: life with God and life with the people around us.
The problem of death began when our first parents, Adam and Eve, disobeyed God and ate fruit from the one tree from which God told them not to eat. But the Good News is that God the Father sent His Son, Jesus, into this world to undo the damage caused by death and sin. Jesus faced the same kinds of temptations that Adam and Eve did—craving physical pleasure, craving what we see and craving personal glory—when He was tempted in the desert and in the hours up to and including His crucifixion. Unlike Adam and Eve, Jesus was faithful in the midst of all these temptation tests, so He has successfully repaired and rebooted all of creation.
Through faith, Jesus has brought to life a new person within us. With Jesus, we have new life right now and the promise of Resurrection Life to come. We live with that Resurrection Promise by becoming aware of the difference between the old person and the new person within us. The old person gets hooked by all those craving and temptations, so with God’s help, when we feel that hook coming, we turn away. The new person only wants Jesus because they know that they have everything they need in Jesus.
Jesus is our life. He is our all-in-all. So we rest in Jesus and the life that He gives us. He is the Great High King of Heaven and He is the King of our heart.
Dear Jesus, thank you for giving me life. Help me to rest in You and the life You give me. Help me to live with an awareness of the preciousness of life. Amen.
Farewell to Shadowlands 