Guatemala

I am spending this month in Antigua! It is so charming here. It is a tourist town for sure, which makes for nice aesthetics, hostel living, and a higher price on everything in sight. Soon we get to start playing with kids in an orphanage,visiting people in a local hospital and going to local schools doing programs. But this week is a bit slower. We just happened to be in one of the most visited places in the World for Holy Week! 

There are flocks of people here, many festivities, and soon the whole town will shut down for days to watch traditional processionals. And you should see these processionals. Hundreds of men carrying large crosses, or statues on float like things. Huge beautiful “carpets” which I’m pretty sure are adult sand art which line the cobble stone streets! It is interesting to say the least. 

                       

But all this easter celebrations reminding me of a few Easters back…

 I remember the first time I was divinely overwhelmed with God’s love.
It was my sophomore year of college and I was on Easter break. I woke
up early Easter morning and thought it would be appropriate to read
the Easter story by myself. I randomly choose to read it out of John.
I start reading a little before about all the crazy awesome miracles
Jesus did. I get to the part about the passover meal and how Jesus
had it in some random dudes house, and then gives the disciples wine
and bread and makes references to his death and stuff that sounds a
whole lot like cannibalism and how some of them are traitors.

Then they go to pray in a garden. I like praying in nature so I like
that Jesus did too. So I’m reading through Jesus prayer in the garden
and then I come to the part where he prays for future believers…and
that would be me… and I’m suddenly overwhelmed.

“My
prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe
in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father,
just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that
the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the
glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one-I in them
and you in me-so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then
the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you
have loved me.“Father,
I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see
my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the
creation of the world.

Jesus prayed for me…For
ME. He desires oneness with me. He desires to bring me into His
glory. I don’t know why but in the moment I think the Holy Spirit
revealed just a small bit of revelation about the greatness and
beauty of Jesus’ extravagant love for me.

And I started crying
right there. Slightly weirded out that I was crying…but knowing
that this type of love should move something
everything
in us. Its a revolutionary kind of love. A life changing living
breathing love. And I was distrubed with the beauty of it all. And I
think that was the day that grown up me started falling in love with
Jesus. “We
love, because He first loved us”

And
the thing with this kind of love is it feels real good to sit in it.
And I think we are suppose to do that. Refuel in Him, Enjoy our
father and he enjoys our love back…but it also beckons us to
something outside ourselves. Because Jesus doesn’t just love me with
this fabulous, unexplainable, grace and truth filled love…He loves
everyone. He doesn’t only want to save me, love me, and move me from
one degree of glory to another….His heart is for the world. It’s
for the annoying guys, the ugly and outcast, the rich, the arrogant,
the selfish, the neighbor whose dog just won’t shut up! .

This
love is meant to be shared.