The Lord has risen.

He has risen indeed!! You know one of my favorite blogs to read is that of Dan Hames, in England. He sent out an e-letter last spring to his readers, and it's truth and simlicity impressed me so deeply that I never deleted it from my inbox.

I thought that, since it's that time of year again, it would be worth posting up for everyone to see. Here's what he wrote:


~*~*~*~*~*~

Hello boys and girls of the wired world,

Well... the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the world is coming back to life. It is a strange thing how Summer slips away so gradually that it's not until the first rays of the Spring sunshine that we realise we have been living in Winter. Yesterday, as I walked in the little wood near my house, I noticed how things look so much greener- that nature was fighting back.

So we're heading for Easter and we can see that all around us, Life wins over Death. It's because creation is relfecting the big win one day 2000 years ago when bizarrely, one man killed death by giving himself up to die.

Of course death has its mark on us all and it means to be our downfall, but something huge happened in Jerusalem- we can see our own death get killed and we can come to life just like those trees after Winter which break-out into leaves and buds and life.

I can see that God was my biggest problem, God provided the solution, God justifies the wicked and God is the whole end and goal of it all. Amazingly, this wild story is all symbolised in that very common symbol that we see hanging around people's necks, tatooted on their arms and stuck on churches. And there's a little phrase that we like to use to talk about that: "the gospel". Let me tell you that the gospel changes everything because the more I know about myself, the bigger the cross gets. The more I see how being a rebel has damaged me, the more I understand how earthshaking the cross is.

I'm so excited about the gospel that I borrowed a poem from a lady called Elizabeth Cecilia Clephane who died in 1896 and I made some news music for it. It's on my Myspace now. Go and listen- I hope you like it.

Here's to Easter. Here's to life. Here's to the cross.

Love,
Dan