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- Written by: Don Goulding
And he died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised. (2 Corinthians 5:15)
For centuries, the love of Romeo and Juliet has been celebrated because tragic love is the most profound.
The families of the lovestruck couple were feuding, so they married secretly. Then Juliet’s father engaged her to a self-absorbed count. In response, she swallowed a drug to simulate death. Her plan was to be entombed and later rise to escape with Romeo, but he found her comatose and assumed she was dead, so he poisoned himself. When Juliet awoke and discovered the truth, she stabbed herself to join Romeo in death.
The story of John meeting Jane in high school, marrying, having 2.5 healthy children, and living happily ever after doesn’t engage our hearts because it’s unchallenged love. Jesus’s love for me is not John and Jane’s love but Romeo and Juliet’s love. It’s tragic love.
Jesus said, “I will die so we can be together.” He knowingly left perfection to enter a hateful world that murdered him. The intensity of his love compelled him into this most epic tragedy in history.
Like Juliet, it’s now my turn to die for Jesus. But this plot has a twist. Though Christ died, he arose again, and his Spirit returned to live in me, his lover. As I die to myself, the life of my true love lives on in my body. In new ways every day, I reciprocate the death of him who is my passion. It’s the love saga of ultimate sacrifice and perfect union. Our mutually tragic love will be celebrated throughout eternal history.
Prayer: Yes, Great Love, we willingly die for each other.
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- Written by: Don Goulding
He gave them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest garden plant and becomes a tree, so that the wild birds come and nest in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31, 32)
It began when I was a boy and realized I had sinned. I needed the forgiveness offered through Jesus. I was baptized at eleven, and the seed of eternity was planted in my heart.
As the years passed, I came to know God’s Son as more than my savior.
Now, Jesus is the mortar that holds every brick of my life together. He is the remedy for my raging dysfunction and the doctor who sets my dislocated life back in place. He is far more than the sum of everything in the universe.
The Spirit of Jesus is the music that transforms my spastic twitching into dance. He rains on my Martian landscape, changing it into a teeming Serengeti. When health fails or friends abandon, Jesus is the sunshine that fills the icy crevasse. He is my freedom, my peace, and my only hope.
Imagine the vacuum of outer space. You try to draw a panicked breath, but there’s no air to inhale. There is nothing but reflexive gulps at emptiness. That’s what it’s like to live without Jesus.
If Jesus is removed from the equation, life ceases to exist—it becomes merely a shell, like a clam without its creature or a cocoon vacant of its butterfly. There is no life, only a void of darkness with fading memories of the concept of light.
Though my faith in Jesus began as a tiny seed, it has grown into an unmovable tree of many years. Still, my branches strain toward him. They cannot turn away until I have joined with my everything.
Prayer: Jesus, I want you more than life.
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- Written by: Don Goulding
See that you do not disdain one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven. (Matthew 18:10)
On our last day in India, our team visited an orphanage in Chennai. Fourteen freshly bathed children met us at the gate and handed each of us a rose.
The grade schoolers pleaded, “Uncle, come sit by me.”
“Aunty, over here, please sit between us.”
They pumped love into us from their eyes.
The day before, there were fifteen children, but one was sent to the terminal care center. These were AIDS orphans, and they knew they had little time on earth. They were shunned by their community, lived in faith for their next meal, and had their life expectancy hacked short.
It didn’t matter to the orphans that the world had wrung them of life. They were connected to the face of their heavenly Father and amply supplied with what really mattered. We had first world wealth, experiences they couldn’t imagine, and education on a host of subjects—and they gave to us. These were spiritual giants, magnates of unlimited resources who tossed out fortunes of goodwill as though it cost them nothing.
The words of Jesus shouted from the pages of Revelation, … you say, “I am rich and have acquired great wealth, and need nothing,” but do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. He says that about me and the people I live among, not about the orphans of Chennai.
The kids were a living motto—Joy for what is, without a care for what is not. I need that kind of trust in my life. Our visit made me realize that from my place of impoverishment of heart, I must look up to the shining orphans of Chennai.
Prayer: Father of the fatherless, make me rich in spirit like them.