Random thought: How cool your parents are is directly proportionate to how much they can trust you.
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Well I finished the book The Jesus I Never Knew like a long time ago but I still have that document on my desktop with stuff to post about it so here goes one more!!
I take hope in Jesus' scars. From the perspective of heaven, they represent the most horrible event that has even happened in the history of the universe. Even that event, though - the crucifixion - Easter turned into a memory. I can hope that the tears we shed, the blows we receive, the emotional pain, the heartache over lost friends and loved ones, all these will become memories, like Jesus' scars. Scars never completely go away, but neither do they hurt any longer. We will have re-created bodies, a re-created heaven and earth. We will have a new start, and Easter start.
There are two ways to look at human history, I have concluded. One way is to focus on the wars and violence, the squalor, the pain and tragedy an death. From such a point of view, Easter seems a fairy-tale exception, a stunning contradiction in the name of God. That gives some solace, although I confess that when my friends died, grief was so overpowering that any hope in an after-life seemed somehow thin and insubstantial.
There is another way to look at the world. If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality. Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life.