Our Meal

This morning, I shared a meal with a 97-year-old woman who should have died in surgery and a single mother struggling to keep the lights on and an older man immersed in a slog of depression. We came hungry, broken, and tired, intensely aware of our deep need.

We feasted on the holy love generated by our shared lives, shared pain, and shared redemption. We wept and laughed and prayed together, delighting in brothers and sisters who gladly bear our burdens, share our joys and sorrows, and give selflessly, generously, of themselves.

We also feasted on physical food: Bits of bread torn from the loaf, just as our outlawed Lord's body was torn by His tormentors; sips of blood-red juice poured from the cup, just as His blood dripped onto the dry dust beneath His cross.

It's a desperate sort of remembrance, I suppose. After all, what sort of fool places his hope in the strength of a condemned, tortured man slowly suffocating beneath a darkened sky two millennia ago?

The answer is desperate fools like me. We see the weakness of our own strength. We see the futility of our self-made righteousness. And we are captured by the glorious hope in this story that sometimes seems too good to be true. 

More than that, we see its fruit in our lives. If this be a vain pretense, then it is at least one that has swept away vast swaths of darkness and death in my life and the lives of my sisters and brothers. It has utterly changed me and continues to do so.

So I partook of the blessed feast again this morning, looking back with thankfulness at how it removed me from the realm of darkness and death and looking forward with hope to the redemption of my flesh and this lovely broken world. Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.