Resurrection(s)

When my good friend Margarita invited me to contribute to this blog, I was excited at the prospect and I asked her what the title was.

"Resurrections," she said. Honestly, I wasn't too crazy about that title right away because, for me, it conjured up images of zombies, vampires and other nasty things crawling out of graves and wandering in the night. (Yeah, I've seen too many sci-fi movies.)

I also rarely think about resurrection in the plural sense, and further, I don't think people even say "resurrections" -- just like no one says "furnitures" or "pastas". There's the resurrection in the same way that there's the White House, singular.

However, once I put aside my gut reaction and started thinking about what it means for the believer to be "raised with Christ," it didn't take me long before I figured out that the founders of the blog were probably exploring this idea of how resurrections are all around us in various ways.

At the individual level, each believer is a new and glorious creation in Christ, a resurrection. And within the story of that person's life, there will be many parts where the gospel makes seemingly dead things come to life, such as broken relationships, forgotten and suppressed talents, and lost hopes. At the Creation level, there are villages that have seen land that had previously been absolutely barren for decades suddenly flourish after prayer.

These are all, for lack of a better term, mini or micro resurrections. Christ rising from the grave and securing eternal life is the macro and ultimate resurrection.

Maybe I'm getting the concept of resurrection confused with restoration since the two are closely related, but either way, it's amazing that true life is springing forth here and now, that it's a free gift, and that it will one day be the only thing we know.

The background graphic of this blog, a grass field with plants and seeds, is somewhat ironic because all those things will eventually die, yet I also think it's a good image for celebrating eternal things because, as the Bible says, "So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable." (1 Corinthians 15: 42)

What has been resurrected is eternal -- along with the good works that come out of that -- and I'm looking forward to celebrating those things through this blog.