Spring Cleaning

It's been a while since I've blogged...I'm not sure where to begin again...BUT since it's springtime I thought it might be nice to talk about cleaning. Now this might be a scary word for some of you...I personally enjoy cleaning, and I actually clean when I am stressed...it works out great for the house. Anyway, we'll get back to that in a little while...recently we celebrated Easter, we're still actually celebrating Easter.

I was blessed to spend some good, quality time with my brother and sister-in-law for a couple of weeks over the holiday. They happen to live in Italy, so that made the time spent with them even MORE enjoyable. So while I was there we got to see the Shroud of Turin, this is the cloth that wrapped the body of Jesus after He died. What a gift! I felt so blessed to see it up close and examine the wound marks on His chest and back, the blood marks from the crown of thorns and look at the imprint of His face. My Jesus. Right there in front of me...it made me realize something...it took a while to process, but after coming home and getting back into the swing of things at work, I began to think more about that cloth. People think that it might be a fake, or that it isn't really Jesus' imprint on the cloth...but I believe it to be the real image of Jesus there...I saw a photographic negative of Jesus on that rainy day in Turin. We live our lives thinking that if Jesus would just give us a sign, we'd stop doing what we're doing and follow Him...or if He'd just preform some miracle in front of us we would believe more firmly in Him. But that's the lie that Satan wants us to buy into. That's the lie of the world...we can't see Him, He hasn't done anything lately...look at all the hurt and violence, disease and death...He could come and stop it if He wanted to. He did! That's the thing...He did! Over 2000 years ago...He hung on a cross for all that violence, death, destruction...you name it...He hung on a cross for it. We tend to say that Jesus doesn't give us signs, I feel like the sign I saw in that cloth was one of the most real signs He gave us...the wounds that were imprinted on that cloth give us proof of His sacrifice. The same sacrifice that is offered everyday around the world on every altar in every Catholic church! Jesus gives us His body, He gave His blood so we could be made new!

That gets me to the Spring Cleaning part of this blog...if we say that Jesus is Lord, if we choose to believe that He came to save us...then we better be willing to say that for better and for worse. The Apostles left everything to follow Him...He didn't preform magic tricks in front of them to make them come and follow Him. They saw something in Him that they chose to believe. If we choose to believe like they did...I'm sure that there are things that we need to get rid of...I can think of a half dozen in my life that I need to clean out so Jesus can more fully be in my life...Spring is the perfect time to start again...everything is new...and Jesus came, died and rose so that we could be made new! Happy cleaning!