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“Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment” (Luke 23:56).

Only Luke - a New Testament author known to include details – offers a glimpse into life on the day after Jesus’ crucifixion and the day before His resurrection. I have often thought that the weather on the Saturday before Easter should always be gray and gloomy; the atmospheric conditions matching what must have been the emotions of Jesus’ friends and family. In addition to grief, they obviously were bewildered because Luke also records a conversation two had as they walked away from Jerusalem, from the scene of broken hearts, ”we had hoped that He was the one who was going to redeem Israel”

I, too, have known the heavy weight of grief, a weight that causes the body to slump into mindless sleep only to awaken in the dark hours, in those first moments, denying the reality of death and then almost immediately becoming aware of all that has happened. But I also have discovered comfort in “obedience to the commandment.”

By faith in the One who loves me, I laid my anxiety at His feet, I thanked Him for His sovereignty and presence, I prayed for myself and the weeping others, and then “The peace of God, which transcends all understanding” put a guard on my heart and mind so that I could go about the daily-ness of life. The women prepared spices and perfumes; I prepared meals and made beds. In a few short hours those women would experience the joy of the resurrection. One day I, too, will fully experience that joy.

It’s not always easy to go about the daily rituals when the heart is heavy, Lord, but I thank you for the balm those rituals bring to sorrowing souls. Thank you for being a God of the daily. Amen.

Questions: How do you respond to grief? What difference has Christ made in your time of grief?

Take a fresh look at several Christmas carols, spanning several countries and several centuries.

“Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me
Cast me not away from your presence,
and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit”  (Psalm 51:10-12).

What great way to start off each day! It puts us in our place and God in His. It is like asking for a fresh start. We want God to create in us a clean heart, a brand new slate unspoiled by any hurts or f from the day before.

That means renewing a right (some translations say steadfast) spirit in us. Then as we go through the day, we do not wish to be far from God’s presence nor have the Holy Spirit stop guiding us in our thoughts, speech and actions.  We want the right relationship restored, our sins confessed and forgiven so we can be in His presence and not block the Spirit’s whisperings to us. And we want to be upheld through whatever happens that day, good or bad, or in between.

There have been times I had to breathe this memorized-as-a-child prayer during my day. In fact, there have been weeks when I had to constantly ask God to renew a right spirit in me when I felt under attack. Each time I pray this Psalm I feel sacredness enter into the mundane.  I feel a connection with the faithful who for centuries prayed the same words morning after morning. And I know my prayer is answered, again.

Questions: Do you have a Bible verse that is sacred to you that you can pray? What is it? If not, pray to God to show you one.

About the Author Julie Cosgrove

It is with serious intent that I intrude upon our devotional moments in these missives with things such as coffee, the Da Vinci Code, jogging, iPods, Bonnie Raitt, and Dodger dogs. There is a method to this madness – to splash a little profane around the sacred so that the opposite might happen when we leave this devotional reflection to the end that the sacred might invade our profane existence and open our eyes to God in the world.

It’s all about connections. The more we learn to connect God’s truth to the physical world and the culture that surrounds us, the more we will be able to live a life of worship. Worship does not consist in leaving the world to see God, but in learning to see God at all times in the world.

The separation of the sacred and the profane is hard to shake. It is deeply engrained in us, the result of a long history going back at least to the early Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, who taught that the good and the sublime exist only in the non-physical realm. The body was tainted; the spirit was pure. The Gnostics came along and took it even farther. They believed the physical does not even exist. It is an illusion. The only truth is what you know in your mind.

Then along came Jesus. He busted the whole paradigm because he was the essence of the spiritual – God himself, to be exact – in human flesh and bone. He ate and drank and got dirty walking the road of life, and made it all sacred in the process. He told stories about vines and branches and farmers and merchants and kings and widows. He changed water into wine, sickness into health, death into life. He healed people’s bodies and forgave their sins at the same time. He paid his taxes, helped his disciples fish, and cooperated with Roman rule. And even after his resurrection, he made breakfast for his little band of followers and ate with them.

To Jesus, life was a mixed bag of the holy and the common, but mostly the common made holy by his touch. In Jesus, the sacred and the profane meet, resulting in the realization that the profane can be redeemed. Our earthly existence can be given spiritual value. The physical world is not disconnected from the spiritual one, nor is it at odds with it, but the physical world can embody all that is spiritual. The Word became flesh, and since then nothing has ever been the same. Now work, play, recreation, entertainment, and even commerce can contain God’s glory. Indeed, the entire physical world is merely a front for the spiritual realities it illustrates.

So to go into the world, leaving God back in your devotions somewhere would be a big mistake, when in reality, by focusing on him, you are just getting warmed up to discovering him everywhere else.

Question: What are some of the ways that we compartmentalize our lives into “sacred” and “profane”? How can we seek to redeem the so-called “profane” parts for God?

About this Author: John Fischer

**Are you struggling with a burden today? We would love to pray for you. http://retirementwithapurpose.com/chat/share.html

Recently I have been trying to intentionally move toward a more sacred way of living. This does not include plans to move into a monastery—though on especially frantic days, that thought has appeared delightfully inviting—but rather a disciplined attempt to purposefully stop at appointed times of the day to turn my thoughts toward God.

A stumbling block to this spiritual – sounding plan has been the many mundane responsibilities of life. Some days the list includes committee meetings, business-oriented telephone calls and factual correspondence. Other days the hours are filled with tasks falling into the column of housewifery: grocery shopping (prices always increasing), laundry (permanent press a blatant lie), removing grime from corners and ridges of woodwork (why, oh why did we choose white wood trim?).

Behavioral experts teach that in order to form a new habit, time and attention needs to be paid to the process. Often we need reminders to move toward the desired change, and while sometimes the reminders can be pleasurable, others may be unpleasant or painful. To lose weight, perhaps a picture posted on the bulletin board of a new dress in a desired size will be helpful. The individual who wishes to break the smoking habit and move toward healthier living may need to view pictures of a diseased lung, or visit with people undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer.

Several months ago we received as a gift a bronze sculpture, a small replica of the nearly life-sized Max Greiner original entitled “Divine Servant,” which depicts Jesus washing the feet of one of the disciples. This small sculpture on its wooden base was placed on a living room window sill where guests frequently commented on its meaning. As I contemplated my desire to live in a more consistently sacred way, and my frequent failures to do so, I wondered, “Could this sculpture be at least part of God’s answer?”

We read in the Bible how Jesus stripped off his outer robe, then bowed to wash the dirty, smelly, calloused feet of his friends. It mattered not one whit to him that this job was the task of the most menial servants, usually the household slaves. Jesus’ close friend, John, in remembering that important night records the incident with telling words: “He (Jesus) showed them the full extent of his love…”

Jesus seemed to place no higher value on the “spiritual” tasks of calming a sea, healing the blind, touching a leper, speaking salvation to a religious leader or a Samaritan woman. John van de Laar writes that “He (Jesus) is also encountered when we serve ‘the least.’ In this way all work becomes an opportunity to meet Christ again, a potential for receiving and giving the grace of Christ.”1

The small bronze sculpture has moved from a window sill to the shelf over my sink. It has become a highly visible reminder to accept and acknowledge all work as sacred and to meet Christ in the middle of that work. When my eyes rest on the figure of Christ as my soapy hands scour crusty pans, or as I prepare yet another supper, my lips whisper the long-ago words of the menial servant-monk, Brother Lawrence: “Lord of all pots and pan and things…Make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates!”

1 John van de Laar. “The Living Sacrament.” Conversations Volume 5:1 Fall/Winter 2007: pp. 50-54.

Questions: What change is needed in your life to allow you a more sacred way of living? What could you do to “bow down and wash the dirty, smelly, calloused feet” of someone?

About the Author: http://talk.thelife.com/experience/devotionalforwomen/authors/marilyn-ehle/

** Singles: Does God promise you a spouse? http://christianwomentoday.com/womenmen/promise.html

“Remind the people to be…peaceable and considerate, and to show true humility toward all men” (Titus 3:1, 2).

A couple of years ago, my wife planted blueberries beside our house, about seventy feet away from the nearest faucet. We had a cheap hose at the time that kept splitting as I hauled it across the lawn to water the blueberries. I had to cut the hose and reset a new nozzle every time it split, so I finally got fed up and went to the hardware store and got a “heavy-duty, industrial strength” hose, guaranteed not to split.

I felt so happy with my purchase – finally a decent hose! It made me smile, just looking at it. I’d pick it up, feel its weight, and say to myself, “No way this baby is ever gonna split.”

Imagine my chagrin when Lisa barged into the house one evening and exclaimed, “I hate that stupid hose!”

My super industrial-strength beauty proved far too heavy for my poor wife. When she tried to lug it across the front yard and the driveway to reach the side of our house, it felt like she was trying to pull a stubborn mule. I bought that hose thinking of me; I never even considered whether Lisa would be able to lift it.

Although some might consider this a simple inconsiderate act, at a deeper level it revealed my prideful self-centeredness. I didn’t mean to act intentionally cruel, but I did act thoughtlessly cruel. I simply didn’t pay attention to what was best for Lisa. Worse, I hadn’t even thought about Lisa when I made the purchase. I had grown tired of repairing the hose, so I determined to make my own life better – as it turned out, at her expense. (We ultimately found a coiled hose that weighed much less but still stretched the necessary distance).

Spiritual humility – what the ancients called “the queen of the virtues” invites us to become more thoughtful, more aware, and more sensitive to others. In our arrogance, we can get so wrapped up in our own world that we can’t see anyone else.

Humility is often built on the little things in life, and marriage is 90 percent small stuff. These small occurrences are, as writer Andrew Murray puts it, “the tests of eternity” because they reveal what’s in our hearts. We don’t build humility on giant gestures as much as forge it with consistent, thoughtful actions, day after day.

This “queen of the virtues” so often gets misunderstood. We don’t find humility by demeaning ourselves or criticizing ourselves or denying that God has given us obvious gifts and talents. Vertically, we find biblical humility by pointing others to the one true hero of Scripture, namely, God himself: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30). Horizontally, we find it by thinking less about ourselves and more about others (Philippians 2:4). We embrace humility when we refuse to get so wrapped up in our own worlds that we can examine what we are doing and saying in light of how our actions affect those around us. We find it when we stop pretending we are at the center of the universe, and instead adopt Jesus’ attitude of becoming a servant of all (Mark 9:35) – which requires us to start actively thinking about others.

What better arena to learn this than in marriage? What relationship seems designed to confront our self-preoccupation more than living with a spouse?

Learn the joy of consideration. Free yourself from the constraints of being focused on yourself. Allow God to use your marriage to teach you to think of others.

Questions to ponder: In what areas of your relationships are you being thoughtlessly cruel? If you are married, where are you not even considering how your actions (or inactions) are making life difficult for your spouse?

Questions: Are you sometimes annoyed with your spouse’s habits? Check out this video: http://thelife.com/study/lovebusters.html?section=annoying_habits&ft=BSG-OS

About the Author: http://tmdevotionals.com/men/authors/gary-thomas/