Dearly Beloved,
It looks like winter once again. I sit at my desk and watch the slushy snow fall on our parking lot. Perhaps it's a good day to reflect on our scripture readings for this Sunday: readings from Ezekiel 37 (can these dry bones live?) and John 11 (Lazarus's death and resurrection).
These resurrection stories feel almost pre-emptive. Like we're jumping ahead to engage with new life when we haven't even faced death yet. But then, perhaps the reality is that it's always both-and. Perhaps the reality is that we best face death with the knowledge of new life and that we best face new life with the reality of the death that must precede it.
What in your life is dying? Or dead?
In the story of Lazarus, Jesus is greatly disturbed, not once but twice. He weeps openly in grief and sorrow.
What needs to be grieved?
What endings? What doors closing? What death do we need to acknowledge?
It's tempting to just want to jump to the end of the story.
But the end of the story means nothing without the reality of death.
The resilience of those purple and yellow crocuses means little without days like today when it seems that winter's grip will hold on forever.
In my own reflections, I've gotten thinking again about my childhood in South Africa and Zimbabwe. In many ways, there are parts of me that feel like they died, especially when we left South Africa when I was 6 1/2. When we left, I spoke Zulu as fluently as English and Zulu culture was as much a part of me as white Protestant American culture. I lost my Zulu when we came to the US. I spent 3 1/2 years going only by my American name, Amy, wanting desperately to fit in and just be like everyone else. But the truth has always been, I wasn't just like everyone else. It is really only in the last 5 years that I have been really grieving those losses. That I have acknowledged what died in me when I was torn from the only home I knew.
And now, it feels like maybe, just maybe, God might be breathing new life into those spaces. Maybe just maybe new life is being coaxed forth. Perhaps, simply by working on the application we submitted a week ago, God is planting seeds that just might take root.
"Mortal, can these bones live?" God asks Ezekiel.
I find myself echoing that answer: "Only you, O God, can know."
And so, in this season as we near the end of Lent, as we approach Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his betrayal, torture and execution, I hope we can all walk in trust. Can what has died live again? God only knows!
What good news.
In love and anticipation,
Thandiwe
