All to Jesus I surrender

This weekend we are celebrating Easter.  I love this time of year.  The prospects of summer on the horizon. My birthday as well as two of my girls are all right around this time.  Annuals bloom, of course that brings out the loveliness that is allergies, and baseball season begins.   It is a great time of the year.  

In recent years this time of year fills me with a myriad of emotions, some good and some extremely hard. This is a season of endings and beginnings for me.  Every time we would move from state to state growing up it came at this time of year.  It was right at the end of this season that I met mark. It was this season of the year that my pregnancies with Brylee and Teagan came rapidly crashing to a close and that I lost my first baby.  And this year it came with the loss of a man I love almost too much for words.  

I have a love hate relationship with this time of year.  

For several years however as Mark and I have approached the Easter season we have been lead to observed the Lentenseason in a variety of ways.  Lent is not a common practice amongst the churches I grew up in, but I have grown to love what is has done for me personally in preparing for Easter and more importantly realigning my heart and my head with what God has for me. 

Lent for me has come more as an act of submission and surrender than an act of self deprivation.  In light of the circumstances surrounding our family I chose not to "give anything up" for lent this year, but the Lords moving in my heart has been no less.  Amidst and broken heart and spirit I am being taught more and more about what true surrender looks like in my life.  

I have spoken several times before about loving my children with an open hand.  That act of letting go of my theoretical plans for their lives and mine and being willing to instead of lead, actively follow the Lords direction for our life and our family.  Actively following feels like an almost impossible task some days.  It is the process that goes beyond letting someone pull you forward from one thing to the next, like I often do with my kids and instead it is choosing to trust someone else, in this case a holy God, to guide me in such a way that the end result is better for me that I could do on my own.  It is being willing to take steps in pursuit of a leader that did not promise an easy journey, but a glorious end.  

I was drawn to the idea today of what active following looked like in those days leading up to the cross.  I have the ignorant bliss of not knowing the trials and joys that lay before me on a daily basis.  While yes that is frustrating at times I have come to grow in the knowledge and gratitude for the fact that I can enjoy the peace of the calms before the storm.  Jesus however knew.  Fully God and fully man I can't begin to wrap my brain around what the human side of him was going through.  Scholars say that in the garden he was literally sweating blood.  Sweating blood.  I often have severe anxiety in anticipation of important events in our life.  Waiting on doctors reports, tests results, trying to prepare myself for if it doesn't go the way I think it should.  But Jesus knew.  He knew every step He was preparing to take, He knew what road, what unbearable agony lay before him.  He knew he would be betrayed, abandoned, and abused.  He knew he would watch the pain in his mothers eyes as she watched death take him.  He knew and he still chose.  

Could I do that?  Could I surrender my all if I knew it meant saving even one.  The thought and depth of what Jesus did for me that day on Calvary takes my breath away.  Even as I write this and try to comprehend I am overwhelmed with the magnitude of it all. 

Jesus paid it all.  All to him I owe.  Sin had left a crimson stain, and He washed it white as snow.  

I pray as this Easter season comes to a close that we can all actively follow God's direction for our lives moving forward.  Pursuing not the journey but the victory the lies in Jesus.  Like Paul says in Ephesians 

“Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

‭‭Philippians‬ ‭3:13-14‬ ‭ESV‬‬

We love and appreciate you all.  Have a blessed Easter