faith-walk

Someone asked me what I remember about this day. I dimly remember going to church with Momma. I wasn’t a Christian then, had not surrendered my life to the Lord, so those memories are vague.

There is another memory that lies deep and forever in my heart; as she asked about today, it rushed out of its hiding place and up into my brain. It is the memory of a Holy Thursday in St. Andrews Episcopal Church. I was a brand new Christian. The priest was Fr. Charley Fulton. His message: What if Jesus had never been born, had not been crucified and raised from the dead?

Charley Fulton cleansed the church, but not ritually and solemnly as it is done in many churches on this day. Rather, he treated it with seemingly total irreverence. It was hard not to cry out as one by one everything that had Christian meaning was removed. He tossed the Bible away — after all, what did a Bible mean if Jesus was not the resurrected Son of God? The cross? Without the resurrection, a meaningless symbol! I was horrified, in tears.

(The next year I knew what to expect. I took someone with me who did cry out.)

At the end he talked seriously about what it all means to us as Christians.

Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. He celebrated the Passover meal with His disciples, showed us our task as servants by washing the feet of the disciples, then went out to pray with such intensity that he literally sweated blood as He faced what lay before Him.

And so begins the blessed Easter weekend. May everyone who reads this have both awareness and peace in their hearts on this special day.