This season, the lesson to be learned for me is that less is more,
and that sacrifice to God brings freedom and life.  This
worldwide recession is forcing us to make sacrifices – spend less money
and make more, or for many of us even hold onto our job and home,
potentially sacrificing the roof over our head and our livelihood.  Many
people are in financial straights; especially people who are older who
are seeing their retirement savings vanish, and
new homeowners who extended themselves too far into unmanageable
mortgages in the reality of a falling real-estate market.  Many are
facing bankruptcy because they have too much debt to bear.  Lots of us
have health problems and don’t have health insurance to cover rising
medical costs.  Some are in the middle of religious or political wars,
dodging bullets and bombs, praying to stay alive.

How are you? 
Really – how is your life?  Please post a comment and let us know about
how you are struggling, and what you’ve learned recently.  Please write
and tell us, so we know we’re not alone in our struggles and
sacrifices.  I am with you, I too have to make a lot of sacrifices and
make significant changes, I’m struggling with some of the same things
everyone else is.

This Easter and Passover
season, I’m thinking about how the two holidays are similar, teaching
us to follow and depend on God 100%.  Easter to me is about Jesus
Christ’s many sacrifices to teach us about God and how he gave His life
and accepted the fate of being killed for His teaching about love,
kindness and forgiveness.  God was there with Him, protecting Him,
loving Him, allowing Him to ultimately transcend death.  Passover, for
me, is all about following God and totally relying on Him against
oppression and evil, sacrificing our own will so that we can follow
God’s leading to the Promised Land of hope and peace.  Although
different in history, both are rites of sacrifice, passage, and renewal
in God’s hands.

These religious holidays are celebrated in
springtime, the point in the season that the dead of winter is now over –
last year’s crops are long gone back to the earth, and the seeds of
hope are sprouting and living new life from old.

Easter and
Passover teach us hope and renewal, in exchange for our love and
sacrifices.  If we follow the path of faith and hope, instead of delving
deeper into our sufferings and hopelessness, the promise of new life,
of freedom from earthy mortality and limitations, is given us in
abundance.  We don’t understand exactly how life from death may work;
yet, it is ours miraculously, only for the price of giving up our
suffering and sinful errors to God, trusting Him to show us the way to
the Promised Land of salvation and infinite life anew.

Have you
put your life in God’s hands?  Have you surrendered to faith and
experienced renewal, new life and salvation?  Please tell us about it,
so that we can also be reminded and renewed in God’s love.

Be
sure to return to this post in the new few days and coming weeks, to see
what others have written in response to you, and me.