THE BLOG

April is here, and with it comes more and more evidences that Spring has sprung and that Easter is not far away. With Easter approaching I was reminded of an experience I had on Good Friday morning several years ago. As I awoke that morning my mind was on the events which had occurred roughly 2000 years earlier. When I sat down for my morning devotion, I decided to read through the biblical account of the Easter narrative. I wanted to be reminded afresh of every detail regarding all that Jesus had experienced on my behalf on that day which for Him was anything but good.

Back in the 1980’s my family lived in Columbia, SC, where I served on the ministry staff of Shandon Baptist Church. Our family lived next to a couple in their mid-70’s. His name was Charlie. One spring day while Charlie was mowing his grass, a rake-like attachment on the front of his lawnmower caught my attention. Out of curiosity I walked over and asked him about the attachment. He explained that it was a device designed to dethatch his centipede lawn.

In a sermon my pastor recently preached, he mentioned a man named Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the German Holocaust. Though Frankl survived, he lost several of his immediate family members to death by gas chamber, including his wife. From that and other life circumstances, Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. In it he made an interesting observation—especially coming from a man who had lost so much: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”