FaithPrayers Newsletter – July-August 2013
When a person has never prayed, it can seem a bit daunting at first to do so. And yet, for most of us whatever our background, in an hour of need we find ourselves almost instinctively crying out to the Being we somehow know is out there… someplace. This has been true through millennia.
As the author C.S. Lewis once mentioned: we cry out for food when we are hungry, and such a thing as food exists. It seems most likely that we cry out to God because such a Being exists. Unless the majority of our ancestors from every ethnicity, race and culture around this globe were wrong, we might want to consider why, through the ages, they continued to cry out to the heavens. They cried out to the One who made them because the cry came, inherently, from the depths of their being. They knew to call out, even if they differed on the particulars about that Being.
Most of us who believe that Jesus is alive today are especially convinced by our experience of his presence in our personal life and in the life of our community of Jesus followers. However, our personal experiences are often discounted or reinterpreted by those who have not yet had these experiences. That is certainly understandable. So are there other reasons to at least consider that God may really have raised Jesus from the dead? Drawing on many authors, but with special attention to N. T. Wright and Frank Morrison, I would like to suggest a few:
I first read those words some twenty-five years ago on a church bulletin. I went home, cut off the front of the bulletin, and immediately put it on my refrigerator with magnets. I didn’t want to lose it. For many years, I would pull it out each January and put it back up. I had no idea where the words came from, as the bulletin simply said the author was “anonymous”. I only knew that something about them spoke deeply to my heart. It was much later that I discovered the author was Miss Minnie Haskins, a grocer’s daughter from Bristol, England. It is said that the words came to her while standing on an upstairs balcony one night, looking down a lighted path to the gate at the end of the drive.