Luke 24:5b-7 NLT
'Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Remember what he told you back in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again on the third day.'
Throughout my life, since leaving my parental home, I have carried a box of precious things. These are items that carry special meaning for me. There is nothing remarkable among them, save the personal memories they carry. That box is now in my loft, since I do not return to it on a regular basis. I know where it is, just as the women thought they knew where Jesus was.
Dr Luke reminds us that the presence of God is ever-moving. We have to remain alert to ensure we are pursuing that presence and not assuming we can settle for what we think that we know.
Whenever we assume that we have taken hold of God, we are in danger. We can easily move our gaze from God to the many distractions life presents, and wake up one day to the alarming discovery that God is not where we thought he was. Despite Jesus’ teaching, these women, along with his closest friends, failed to grasp his message of resurrection.
Many of us become distracted and lose sight of the risen Christ. In such moments we can seek to reconstruct our understanding of God to marry with such worries and contradictions. To do so is to seek to incarcerate God in a tomb of our design and consign the creator to a special box carefully stored in the loft of our imagination. Or, with these women, we can pay heed to the voices of the angels, revisit our understanding of God and listen again to the voice of God so that we go in search of the living, not the dead.
QUESTION: Have you reduced God to something stored in a spiritual box of special things?
PRAYER: Like those women, may I go in search of God’s presence today and every day.

Released on 13 Apr 2020