For thus the LORD said to me:

“I will quietly look from my dwelling
like clear heat in sunshine,
like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.”
Isaiah 18:4

Holy week is over, and Easter 2017 is behind us. In a sense, it’s like coming home from camp. Did you have this experience as a kid? For a week, you’re thrown together in tight quarters, night and day, forging these intense friendships in the cauldron of the life of shared experiences. For some, it was an outdoor thing, others, a music or arts camp. For me, it was a church camp in Menominee Wisconsin.

More than the details of what each one-week-a-summer experience was like, I remember the letdown of coming home.

Following the intensity of Holy Week, remembering the passion and embracing the agony of Good Friday, musing on what the disciples must have been feeling on Saturday – Jesus still in the grave, and then participating in the explosion of joy and restored the belief that is Easter morning – O! the Glory! — following this week of an emotional roller coaster ride is an ordinary Monday followed by an ordinary week. A little like coming home from camp.

Except, not really. Jesus changed everything when he stepped out of the grave 2000 years ago. It is good to remember every year the astonishing price paid for my soul and to intensely grieve over my sin and its cost.

DO THIS TODAY: Choose one way to up your spiritual game.