Can You Sacrifice for the One Who Sacriiced for You?

     Are you ready for Easter? It is less than a week away. Easter is celebrated in a variety of ways! Keeping the focus on Jesus during Easter takes the same effort as it does to keep Him the focus of Christmas. When you have children, it takes even more focus. Holiday’s in general can easily be taken for granted because we get caught up in the events. Busyness can overshadow the true meaning of holidays. Many times when we are away from home and living in another culture, we miss our traditions and the real meaning of the holiday begins to become more of an internal focus. As I pondered these things, I started thinking of some of my special friends and daughter who will be celebrating Easter in other parts of the world. How will they celebrate and what are they learning from being away?
      For many years, we have had men and women serving our country in Iraq. Dwayne and I have a friend from Springfield, Missouri who is working on Army airplanes in Iraq for the next few years. We got to know him when he came several times to Montana on mission trips.  Every year his church in Springfield would help our new church by coming and conducting sports camp for the local kids.  Our friend, Nathan, was the servant to the group.  He was the one that drove the van, ran around getting food, made lunches, delivered lunches, and ran to the store many times each day for whatever was needed at the moment. He did this with a great heart and without complaint.  Last year, right before he left to go overseas, he realized that he needed to get real with God, and after many years of thinking he was a believer in Jesus Christ; he surrendered his life to Him and became His follower. This will be his first Easter as a Christian. He won’t be seeing family on Easter, or attending Easter services at his church, or seeing all the children dressed up in their Easter clothes carrying their Easter baskets, and he won’t be having a great home cooked Easter dinner. Instead, he will be attending a sunrise service on the soccer field of his army military base. Then, he will have a special lunch cooked by the cheifs at the army dining facility (DFAC). However, he won’t be having a pity party; he will have intimate time with God; away from all the busyness of our life here in the states. When I asked him how he was growing spiritually, he told me, “It has been interesting to experience this strange land. It has been fun to learn that I am in the land of Babylon and not too far from Ur where Abraham came from. Babylon is not far from Baghdad. There are times that I think that God has brought me to the land of Babylon to deal with me as he did with Israel. God had taken me away from everything that was familiar to me. All distractions removed; just Him and me. When I was home on my last R&R, I actually looked forward to coming back to Iraq, just to get back to the simple life again. It is strange how you get institutionalized when you are here. Your days are spent in such a small area compared to what you have back in the states. We have six choices of places to eat : DFAC, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Subway, and Popeye’s. But most of our meals are at DFAC. It is free: you just wash your hands, get your card scanned, and go through the line. It was weird to me the first time that I got into my truck at home and could drive anywhere I wanted to. Freedom was something that I had taken for granted. Just like taking God for granted in our busy lives. Coming over here really put things into perspective for me.”
It has always been my belief that Satan’s greatest tactic to make Christians ineffective is getting them busy. Busyness is destroying our lives, our families, our relationships, our health, and our intimacy with Jesus. I am thankful that no matter how busy I become, no matter how I neglect my relationship with Jesus, He is never too busy for me!
     Has your life gotten too busy? Are you going to spend time with Jesus this week remembering the sacrifice He paid for us: the sacrifice that gives us the ability to have a relationship with our Lord and Savior? After Jesus endured the suffering from sacrificing Himself so we could have a personal relationship with Him; I wonder how He feels when we are too busy to nurture that relationship? May we sacrifice our busyness this week as we honor the sacrifice He gave for us!

After telling everyone good-bye, he (Jesus) went up into the hills by himself to pray.

Mark 6:46