By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer
Slip out of time with me—more than 2,000 years back—and consider:
Jesus was dead. Crucifixion will do that to a person.
But all things are possible, right? Isn’t that what the angel told Jesus’ mother thirty-three years earlier? Clearly, she believed and proved it to be true when she conceived the Word and bore a child.
So imagine how thrilled she must have been when her boy made wine spill from water jars, and blind men blink at the light, and crippled children dance. She must have thought, Yes! when he rode into town through cheering crowds spreading cloaks and palm branches in his path.
All things really are possible!
Yet, what did she think a week later on a hill outside Jerusalem where a Roman cross bore her babe, and his hands spilled blood, and demons danced?
Oh God, this can’t be happening!
Was his death the finale of her faith?
What of the promise?
What of the miracles?
What of that great, cheering crowd?
So now—today, in this century—will we accuse this woman of weak and trembling faith while we raise the same complaint during our darkest days of entombment?
“Everything was going so well.”
“I was so close to victory!”
“Did I miss God?”
For his mother, the third day dawned. Morning, men, and Mary Magdalene found the tomb empty. Jesus’s body was gone—walking gone. Instilled anew with breathing life.
Those who saw him would not have risked their reputations to promote a hoax.
They would not have risked their lives for a fable.
They would not have risked the faith of their Jewish forefathers for anything less than the promised Messiah—the risen Savior of all who believe.
Neither would his mother, the one who believed before his birth. Before his conception.
Jesus lives and because of that, so can we. Death is not the final word. Death does not win.
Indeed, all things are possible.
And we, like his mother and others across the ages, cry, “Jesus is alive!”
Crucifixion will do that. Click To Tweet
Like every sunrise before, it drew him. They always had, though he didn’t know why. He dipped his head until his hat brim cut the line where sky met land. And at the moment white light broke the edge, the blister in his soul split open with the sound of his mother’s voice.
He’s faithful, Clay. Look at that sunrise, so fresh and perfect. It’s His mercy, brand new every morning.
The pain sent Clay to his knees, and he clutched at his chest. Lanced by forgotten words, the blister drained through every pore and ran down his face like acid.
All these years he’d hidden from the memory, the loss, the tenderness of his mother’s voice. It wasn’t worth the impossible price it cost him to remember. Yet she’d drawn him without his knowledge. He could no more break his connection to her than he could his connection to dawn.
“Oh, God.” His voice came strange, strangled. Breath burned his lungs as if it were his first and last. He suddenly understood the source of earlier thoughts—of the dog, the knoll.
The recognition of God’s presence in that storm shattered Clay to the core.
“You told me where to look.”
Another gasp, tight and searing. “You found the boy. Because You love him.”
He dropped back on his boot heels, squinting against the blinding light reflecting from every ice crystal for miles around, stunned by the beauty, but more so by a truth that far out-weighed all the unanswered whys of his life.
“You found me.”
~An Impossible Price Winner of 2021 American Fiction Award for Best Western Book
Inspirational Western Romance – where the hero is heroic.
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