We welcome writer Kerri Leigh Power as our guest blogger today.
I recently watched the BBC wildlife series Planet Earth. It's a breathtaking survey of the diversity of life on our planet. I loved the strange beauty of the foreign habitats—everywhere from deserts to grassy plains to ice caves to jungles.
But most of all, I was awed by the sheer force of life—birds of paradise in New Guinea, penguins in Antarctica, snow lions in the Himalayas, blind sea creatures in the blackest depths of the ocean. No matter how hostile the conditions, life was there, adapting and persisting, finding a path.
This seems to me a powerful message for Lent, and for our own transformation. The circumstances of our lives are often difficult—health comes and goes, friends, jobs, family, nothing stays with us. Ultimately we lose everything, but the force of life that forms us is unstoppable. It's a current we participate in even as we are swept along. I feel it sometimes in myself, or in those moments of connection with another person, when I recognize the force of life in them and in me. What can we call that, other than God?
This is something I'm contemplating this year in the story of the crucifixion—how to surrender to the current of life while playing our tiny part in it. I wonder if this is what Jesus shows us as he goes willingly to the cross? He must have felt great fear and pain. Within that experience, did he know that the life within him was greater than his individual life, and would continue? Is that what he was helping us to see?
How do you surrender to God or to life? What does this mean for you?
