Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado is fascinating to visit. It is a fairly large community of buildings made from six to ten hundred years ago by a people who did not have so much as a wheel of any kind. They built their structures of local stone carved by the use of another stone into the shape of bricks. The buildings are a beautiful warm, pale gold/rose color. They look very inviting, as if their owners might have just left, instead of having left hundreds of years ago. The buildings are intriguing , but even more so are the people who once lived here without metal or any form of beast of burden. No one knows for sure why this large community was abandoned, but it is speculated that hunger drove the inhabitants to leave.

While I was on the mesa, eight thousand feet high, I tried more than once to pray, until I was reminded of a scripture in the book of Luke: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5) I knew that I had come there to discover something deep in human nature and the human spirit. I wasn’t really conscious at first that I was looking for anything; but at Luke’s words I knew that I had been looking for evidence of a God—consciousness in the remains that were left of a whole community. I was mistaken. As God told Moses, and as Jesus quoted Him, “’ I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Mark 12:27)

During Lent we are moving closer every day to Resurrection day, with time to remember and even experience the risen Christ. It’s a time of reflection in preparation for a great renewal, when the veil has been shifted, and even torn away for us to receive the message of a new life. Lent is forty days designated by the churches to prepare our minds and spirits first for Holy Week, and then for Easter itself, when everything that was incongruous and wrong and even evil in the crucifixion has a new light that shines from the tomb into our lives at the words, “He is not here, for he is risen, as he said. (Matthew 28:6)

Lent is a time of reflection, but underneath is an irresistible joy, for we can only pretend that we are sad, for the truth of the resurrection of Christ is undeniable and rests at the foundation of our faith. We cannot deny the evil that exists today in our world, and in our own spirits, but even greater is the depth to which Jesus reached in dying as he did, and the height to which he reached and took us with him in his resurrection. I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die. (John 11:25) Mesa Verde is a fascinating place to visit, but the Word of God delivers life.

Love in Him,

Prue