I enter the Lenten journey this year weak, broken, and sick. How appropriate for this season. How much of my sickness is sin-sickness? Well, I suppose that in a way, it all is. It all originated from the fall, did it not? Whether it is the result of a broken body, my own fallen heart and mind, or the falleness of others.
I am not alone. This who will attend Ash Wednesday service tonight will weep too. We will face our death-curse with denial or grief, or we will probably approach it with some cocktail of the two. Some in attendance will see physical death within the year. We bear the weight of the absence of many lost this year. The rest-EVERY ONE OF US- will see it eventually.
And we ache because in our hollow, we feel a drum-beat reverberation of immortality long-ago lost. Certainly not in this lifetime: we were born into ashes. With broken chromosomal patterns, genetic codes, brain chemistries, and heart valves. But the ache is felt all the way down Adam’s family tree.
But what is a longing if it is not reminiscent of something once-possessed? A deeper, fuller, more complete, endless life? An unburdened, unbroken body, not marred by decay and disease? There is, indeed, a life-code designed to hack into and destroy the death-code. There was and is a second Adam, the Word, present from the beginning, before our prototype. He was not plan b, but He was plan Alpha and Omega. The only plan necessary, omniscient. He is no afterthought or clean-up crew.
Our prototype was created, and He fell, and our creator knowingly carried with Him the life-code, already woven into Adam’s own genetic code. This is the deep magic that would out-smart and over-power the code of sin and death.
We grieve, we long, and we know that Easter counts for EVERYTHING.
The Beautiful Broken 