Passion Week

I remember that in the weeks before I left for college that my mom at times paused as we packed my things into a trunk to tell me all sorts of things about life. They often started with the phrase, “I’ve often thought that…” At the time I just figured she wanted to get in all the things she felt like she should have taught me and was afraid she hadn’t.

Now, if I’d been more mature and realized the importance of what she was saying, I might have had the good sense to have written them down, but I didn’t. And, I’m afraid, the only specific thing I remember was her comment that she thought it was more important to sit around talking to us when she came home from work at night than to clean house—and anyone can look around here and see that I did take that to heart.

So, I imagine that during that last week that Jesus spent with his disciples, he too felt much the same way. For once he was gone, life would be very different for them. And maybe, that’s why John 14 is one of my favorite passages in the Bible. They were all the things he wanted to make sure they knew to carry them through till death. I particularly like how the chapter opens in the Kings James Version:

Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

“Let not your heart be troubled.”

I love those words. I hear them in my ears this day—

“You believe in God, believe also in me.”

If there’s one thing I want to remember, it surely must be that.