Palm Sunday is a 24-hour-ago event of the past. The branches that sweeped through the center aisles of traditional churches are bagged and tossed. "Hosanna" likewise is finished being uttered on the lips of Christ's preparatory children and people for this week before the coming crucifixion. It is a week of mourning; the week when dawns brought not yet joy. In fact, dawn brought the commencement of disobedience, betrayal and suffering. Christ's strength tried in this dread act of crucifixion and now victory remains with love. What a joy we see peeping up over the horizon, under a week away with the risen Paschal lamb. Praise be to God!

For as the Old Testament ended in a curse the New begins with an inherited blessing. An eight-part harmony of blessing pronounced on a mount. Aware of what He would make the Jews remember, the mounts where from the law rattled off the implied blessing and certain cursings on Ebal and Gerizim, Jesus shifts the paradigm. Now as He expresses beatus - for we read "he came into the world to bless us" -  the Gospel is a dispensation of life whereas the law an administration of death. This new promise allures us to Christ. From the hand of the One who cures to the gracious words that precede out of His mouth, indeed we can say "This must be our sweet and loving Savior!"

From now until Easter Monday there is a beatitude to rest in. This week I plan to highlight one or two a day for meditation. As we light daily incense of prayer before God's throne of grace, we see the success of His mercy ministry on His people as responsive to our pleading. Nothing passes between God-all-hearing and fallen man but through His hand.

The beauty of these blessings and their divine revelation is that we see what God expects from us, the meek impoverished spirits that we are, and what we may expect from Him. The covenant is an enjoyable communion. The agreement between God and man is settled and summed.

Is not faith then but a conformity to these characters and a dependence on these promises? For each of these joy-ushering blessings we see a present blessing pronounced and a future blessing promised. This week, the Holy week - each day one Moriah step closer to the cross - we demarcate this exchange of the law for the cup when we acknowledge for what Christ came "as the great High Priest of our profession in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed."

May we be attitudinally bound to this pronouncement of our new identity, given to rectify the mistakes of a blind and carnal world, removing discouragement from we who are weak and poor, and inviting souls to Christ, making a way for His law in our hearts!

*Any wisdom that seems too good to come from my lips most likely comes from Matthew Henry's Commentaries.

Fence Building

Why are boundaries so hard to keep? Because people get flustered when you do. As if there has been no precedent or forethought that setting one may be the more appropriate action to take. What is worse, I get flustered when I try to erect them. Having to put up a fence on your own land is never what you want to spend time doing, nor does it uphold the vision of free-ranging expanse. Just let me be. But it is a protective measure, because vulnerability could be the death of me. Ah-ha! Now we've pinned it.

Vulnerability is double-faced. On one hand, as someone who believes in Someone, I have to be open, honest and staking out my claim to truth. Boring holes, displacing dirt, drilling posts, stringing chicken wire. On the other hand, I am to take refuge, reject self-sufficiency, lean not on the understanding that comes from me, myself and I.

So what am I to do? Lean so heavily that I fall, find myself prostrate, face down. Let my Defender do his job. And then what? Utter in order to adopt the fact that I have been set free to live in freedom. Upon persistence, a second dinner invitation, I can fence myself in with confidence. This is my pre-paid liberty. It's a trickily tight rope to walk across. I was shaky, delivered it poorly, hardly held on, but I made it to the other side. Respect, though it has dissolved and fizzled out of human relation, is something I choose to cling to. Therefore, just as I was declared respectable enough by the Craftsman to be made into something new while I was still splintery (I have written all about these splinters before), so too do His other creations deserve to be utilized similarly. It is a labor of love.

Can I then see this conversation as ground breaking? It is so easy to yell my gossip to eager ears, "NEWS, NEWS, read all about it!"Or in my language community, "Guess what he/she did!!!" Instead, this beat-down principle, respect, that underlies the greatest display of it in all human history, the Cross, perhaps penetrated that disgruntled response of his. I do not expect astonishment. I shut him down, I told him no, I am taken, claimed, accounted for, loved. The first time I saw the Great Gesture truly defended, it was no eye-catching moment for me either. It too came to me in the form of rejection; and quite a bit more devastating, I might add (take a look back at 2009).

But I can pause and recall this little victory dance we call "assurance." It, this snippet of a conversation, this claim to the way of Christ, was not in vain.

"Help me to see

that it is faith stirred by grace that does the deed,

that faith brings a man nearer to thee, 

raising him above mere man."

Ours

Charted territory began to cause problems. So, as the equally-yoked wife of a farmer that my mother was, she bundled her babies, buckled our bodies in the car seats – mine one-size bigger for the almost one-year older that I am – and in the direction of the Monroe, NC, courthouse we proceeded.

Our land was in deed ours, but the government still and always will own the particulars. So knowing, via extensive paper trail, more about the plot than we did ourselves, the topography maps storeroom in the basement of that corinthian-columned building was our destination.

The irony, you see, is kinesthetic. A map is not a territory, but in our 4-year-old bodies, the 3-dimensionality confused our developing senses: our fingers, a kibitzer to the eyes.

Momma borrowed the county’s version of our farm to take home for water table research, buckled us into place, and we faded out of the city and its brown, tactile knowledge into the real land where dirt was dirt.