.

An invitation to take this week,
the Easter Octave,
as an opportunity to experience
the risen Jesus with you
in every hour.

Set five minutes
twice a day
for the next eight days.
Diary these appointments with Jesus
and make these encounters
your priority this Easter Week.

In Jesus God lived and breathed.

He walked and worked.

Laughed and cried.

In Jesus God loves and is loved.

In Jesus God is hated and suffers before being put to death as a criminal.

These were all actual historical events.

But with the Easter event in which God raises Jesus from death we are able to experience Jesus Christ as a living and present event — God-with-us, living, breathing, walking and working, giving and receiving love, and suffering and dying before being raised to the life for which he and we are created.

Jesus is for us today a real and living presence able to be experienced and verified in our own experience today.

What does this mean, to speak of Jesus as living and present, a contemporary experience?

In our own lives we have experienced death. We have also experienced life.

There are days when we feel like death and we cannot see the way ahead. Anxiety and depression threaten to overwhelm us. The nights can be long. We lie awake in interminable darkness. This feels like death and our darkness entombs us.

And then, at last, comes dawn.

Now that we are celebrating Easter the church gives us eight Easter Sundays in a row, the Octave of Easter. 

I’m happy that we have this Easter Octave since I need all the help I can get to digest the impact of the resurrection of Jesus in my life today.

So these daily FFF reflection will continue for this Easter Octave concluding next Sunday.

Each day I will offer a brief reflection and an Easter Encouragement for prayer.

My invitation is for you to join me in making this Easter Octave week an Easter Week Retreat – while continuing with our planned routines and demands,

You might like to join me in making this Easter week a retreat in daily life taking time for prayer, perhaps five minutes two or three times each day of this week.

And let’s pray for each other and for those we love and for a world. Send me at this email john@fff.org.nz with your initials and the initials of those you would like us all to pray for. I’ll add these initials to the posts each day

I know that Jesus, risen and present, will not miss the opportunity to work miracles for those who seek Him in this week.

Image above – Tabernacle Doors,
Ria Bancroft

Click on the image below to enlarge.