In the Garden of Gethsemane

As we approach Easter, and the Glory of the resurrection, it can be too easy to gallop past the emotional rollercoaster of Holy week. It is tempting to brush off the emotional and physical agony that culminated in the agonising death of a man on a Roman Cross of torture, because it all comes to good, in the end.
Why should we focus on the sadness? Because each one of us has our own sorrows that we try to bear, and Jesus, a teacher above all others, spends His last week as a man trying to teach us how to bear our own struggles, how to carry our own crosses.
I don’t think that you can ever really understand the struggle that Jesus went through, that terrible night in the Garden of Gethsemane, the agony of spirit He endured, one of the most poignant and heart-wrenching depiction of Jesus’s humanity that was ever recorded.
Even in the depths of His struggles, He was showing the disciples, and us, the importance of prayer. In the garden, that night, He wanted witnesses to His struggle, not companions falling asleep on the job.
Jesus put conversation with God the Father before His own physical exhaustion: praying, stumbling, crying out, sweating with terror, begging for Spiritual help throughout the night. There was no question that prayer came before any thought of comfort or rest.
Jesus gives us the courage to say in our own prayers that we, too, struggle and err, and need the help of our Heavenly Father. He shows us that, with the help of God, we too can commit to forge bravely on, whatever sorrows shadow our way.
You may well have heard the advice to sleep on a decision – with the rationale being that tiredness and stress do not help with practical thinking. Jesus is showing us that prayer comes first, before rest, before peace, before seeking sanctuary. We need the help of God in our lives It is possible to take a time of difficulty and, with the Will and Grace of the Lord, give Him the victory over your struggles, for HIS Glory.
This Eastertide, ask that that God’s Purpose, not yours, will prevail, in all you do. For everything we do to follow Christ’s teachings is in His name, and to further His everlasting Glory.

AMEN