Reading
Romans 8:35-37
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written:
“For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”
Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
Devotion
This week's painting is "Point of Resurrection" by Lois VanLiew. It hangs in Grace Cathedral in Topeka and was dedicated on November 26, 2025, on the 50th anniversary of the Grace Cathedral, Topkea, fire. Lois VanLiew was a local artist who passed away in February 2026. More on her work may be found here: Lois Van Liew - Artist
God seems to delight in taking calamity and turning it into new life. My favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien had a term for this, “eucatastrophe.” A eucatastrophe is a sudden turn of events in a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and plausible and probable doom. The eagles who show up to rescue Bilbo and the dwarves from the goblins setting fire to their trees in The Hobbit comes to mind as such an event. The Feast of the Resurrection is a dramatic overturning of the calamity of Good Friday. Where in your own life, dear Reader, have you experienced such a thing?
Prayer
Prayer at the Turning of Death to Glory
O Lord of the great reversal,
You who weave light through the last shadow,
receive the one whose breath has stilled,
not as a fading ember,
but as a spark leaping into Your eternal dawn.
Where grief would root itself in the soil of despair,
plant instead the seed of wonder—
that in this ending,
Your mercy has written a sudden joy
no sorrow can unmake.
Let the shattering be the opening,
the silence be the first note of a greater song.
Gather the mourners in the shelter of Your promise,
that they may glimpse, even through tears,
the bright horizon where loss becomes reunion,
and death, the narrow door to life unending.
Amen.