RHYTHM is one of God‘s good gifts to his human creation. Rhythm gives form to speech and to music. Rhythm dežnes the sequence of the seasons and the pattern of our lives.
To me it seems hard to break a natural rhythm, though our 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week society seems far more relaxed about this than I am. But it still seems very strange for me to be writing about the joy of Easter from the depths of the reŸective season of Lent.
The new life of Easter, the promise of eternal life in God‘s raising of Jesus from death, is the Good News that Christians proclaim. But I feel that it is not possible to enter fully and appreciatively into the joy of Easter unless we have žrst prepared ourselves by sharing in the sense of difžculty and gloom experienced by Jesus on the way to the cross.
God knows that there is plenty of sorrow and anxiety and pain and suffering about at the moment. But faith allows us to bundle this up and offer it to God so that he may bind up our wounds and make us whole.
Then we can experience the light of Easter, warming our hearts and our souls and our minds - as the rhythm of God‘s salvation draws us and propels us towards his promised rest in the kingdom where he is light and his rule is gentle and just.
John-David Yule