A Blessed Easter

There is a prayer garden in our city, settled into the base of our desert mountains … the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary’s garden of Jesus’ sufferings.  It is a beautiful place, especially at Easter time.  Desert trees and bushes loaded with yellow blooms litter the landscape. It is an ideal location for the tidy paths that identify the garden’s purpose:  to take visitors through the events of the Passion of the Christ. The work of the sisters internationally is to make Jesus and his sufferings, his love and resurrection power known.  Theirs is a praise ministry; but also a ministry to those who have known persecution and injustice. 

The sisters are our dear friends and pray for us regularly.  Every Easter we bring our barrio kids to walk through the garden.  I am the tour guide, the voice at each station telling the story of Jesus’ walk to the cross.  It is a role I love.  The sisters look forward to our coming. 

There are many parallels of Jesus’ story with the stories of the kids we love …unjust trials, human callousness, crying out to God in distress and confusion, overwhelmed against all odds, the pity of the onlookers, identifying with the guilty and punished, harsh treatment, blood and burials. 

Our junior highers have a little bit of a drive in order to get from the Center to this garden.  Most of the groups arrive for the tour when it is already dark. I have wondered if Gethsemane was a lot like this.  A desert garden, secluded a bit from the city, meticulous … but in the night, lonely, quiet, a little upsetting.  You could picture Jesus, in his isolation.  The first stop on the path is the relief with Jesus praying in the garden.  There is a plaque to the left of the grotto:  “Father though I don’t understand you, I trust You.”  I always hope that even one child embraces this prayer.

The path winds from there to the arrest, then the trial, passes under the arbor to the scourging, past the rose bushes to the crown of thorns, across to where Jesus is falling under the weight of the cross and then stops underneath three massive crosses.  The earlier fidgeting has calmed down, the children are almost silent.  Ours is a gregarious culture, laughing, pushing, shouting, funning … by now, I am talking in whispers.  Some are hugging each other; leaders have their arms around their kids.  What are they experiencing, what are they believing? … I hope its His Divine compassion … “for the joy set before Him, He endured the cross”.

We move on to the cave, the burial, to tell the children about our hope.  “The women, Jesus’ friends are coming back, the morning of the third day, to continue the burial wrapping process.  They encounter two beings flooded with light:  ‘Why are you looking for the living among the dead, He is not here, He is risen’”.

The children follow us back onto the dark path, turn a corner past some bushes and the walkway straightens.  Up ahead, light, they can see the risen Christ.  They walk faster; take a seat quickly on the stone slabs set in front of this last stop.  The chattering starts again, softly.  It’s OK; he’s not dead, He’s alive.  We pray!

Resurrection Lives

Gal. 2:20-- I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

The mission statement of Neighborhood Ministries hopes that many from this community would become passionate for God and his kingdom. 

There is this path we’re on with Jesus and with one another.  So many times on my own path I have visited the garden at Canaan in the Desert and stopped by the Gethsemane grotto.  The best way to describe my prayer those days was the words on the plaque; “I trust you, Lord, in the confusion and chaos of today, I trust you.”

How does someone learn to trust Jesus, when life has been marked by terrific traumas?  The lives we love here move through a great deal of suffering.  I often imagine you as you read about the stories of our kids and families here.  We groan knowing it.  Maybe sometime you decided you couldn’t read anymore and clicked the email off or put the letter away.  Knowing about this much pain is often unbearable.

Trusting Jesus comes over time, like a discipline it is learned willfully, a purposeful decision to believe His love over the fear that He won’t show up.  This gentle learning is often times combined by clumsy setbacks.  The yanking back into the old life accompanies discouragements and bad habits.  The sweet reminders of grace help me come back to my senses and to the Lord’s protection and I mark my growth by seasons or years, and hope for recovery or victory or healing … whatever we call it at the time.  Process … deliberately slow, but real.  New life is real.  Even when I can’t see it, fully.

Easter breaks out before the summer … especially around here.  Resurrection lives … We had a meeting yesterday.  Big lists plastered the walls in our conference room.  We were talking about the intern spots we are filling for summer.  Since January the names have been posted, the ones from within “ready” for an adventure of service and growth.  The experience of acknowledging that thirty-one of our own young people are grabbing a hold of being “passionate for God and His kingdom” is fearfully amazing.  Risk, challenge, affirmation, hope, uncertainty, privilege, responsibility, accountability mark our conversation.

I am the only one over thirty in the room.  The nine managing the list to supervise the emerging leaders aren’t even thirty.  I feel risk, challenge, affirmation, hope, uncertainty, privilege, responsibility, accountability … a thousand more feelings, just for them.

Pray with us!

• For Shylia, Gabriel, Alfonzo, Daniel, Caesar, Skittles, Luis, Carlos, Margarita, Sonia, Josiah, Taylor, Sonia, Johnny, Bethany, Mathy, Alyssa, Andy, Francisco, Veronica, Marcos, Luis, Genevieve, Lilian, Miguel, Octavio, Fernie, Alicia, Felicia, Nate, Jessica
• For $20,000.00 still needed for intern support (and our new fund-raising idea with raffle books)
• For preparations for the summer programs: Kids Club, Jr. high Kids Club, Senior High camp in Colorado, Kids Camp in Payson, I Can Do It trips – in all, about 800 kids ministered to this summer
• For staff – Noel, Andrew, Victor, Lenny, Terence, Dallas, Chris, Andy, Emily, Sarah, Allison, Jeremy, Dee, Nikki, Ian, Kristen

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Isaiah 58 campaign          (A three year 16 M capitol campaign)

…you will be called … repairers of broken walls and restorers of streets where people live.

-- Isaiah 56:12

Keep praying with us as we go forward with the development
of the next four acres of The Neighborhood Center

Please pray for:

• Selection of the architect for the project
• John Cavness – our Contractor
• Fund-raising
• Creating the story books that describe the future of seven centers of program and development (the rehabbing of the buildings and the different components in each building)
• Pulling together all the details of the 25^th Anniversary celebration – Friday, Dec. 7, 2007
• The hard work of completing the anniversary coffee table book – that tells the story of N.M.