God at the Extremes

I remember days at the hospital where I would go down to the birthing center and rejoice with a family and praise God for the birth of a new child, and then go up to ICU and be with a grieving family who was with a loved one who was within minutes of dying.

You know the days. You get the call from the lawyer in the morning that you've been left an outrageously large sum of money by your eccentric aunt. And then you get the call from the doctor in the afternoon that you have stage IV inoperable cancer.

Or you get the promotion at work and your fiancee calls off the engagement that evening. You win the championship game, but get the DUI on the way home.

Life's funny that way isn't it? We live between the extremes. We vacillate from mountaintops of elation and euphoria down to deep valleys of darkness and despair. And sometimes we get hit with both almost at the same time. In those times we feel the full fragility of our humanity. But Jesus knew all about that too. He wasn't immune to the extremes. He knew of great joy and celebration, and he knew of great sorrow and pain. And he too, like us sometimes, knew of going from one to the other in the course of just a few days.

It's the drama of holy week, isn't it? Hailing Jesus as King on Sunday; calling for his execution on Friday.

Fickle folks, we. Unsettled, uncommitted, oscillating in terms of how we relate to Jesus, how we relate to God. We are in love with God, want more, have hearts overflowing with thanksgiving and praise one day. The next we are full of doubt, or we are angry and bitter toward God because something has happened to us which we feel we don't deserve.

Thank God that He meets us – not only in the middle, but at the extremes.