Living in the Paradox

Photo by CarraB at pixabay.com

I jotted a couple notes in my student's assignment book as he wandered through my studio room. Picking up a little cross I had on the file cabinet, he exclaimed, "A mini graveyard!"

"Which way is it supposed to go?" he asked, flipping it over to see the word Hope on one side and Believe on the other.

"It could go either way," I answered, and he wandered on. But his words continued to ring in my mind. It has been a week touched by death, not in my immediate family, but in the lives of my students and friends. Is that what the cross says to me? The ultimate symbol of death, the most cruel death mankind can impose on one of its own?

Maybe. But the cross also whispers something else because Jesus's tomb was found empty on the third day. So I hear a murmur, a murmur of life in Christ. Jesus entered death to conquer it for all of us. The grave is not the end. There is hope when we believe.

I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. John 10:10 (NKJV)