This season, the lesson to be learned for me is that less is more, and that sacrifice to God brings freedom and life.  This worldwide recession is forcing us to make sacrifices – spend less money and make more, or for many of us even hold onto our job and home, potentially sacrificing the roof over our head and our livelihood.  Many people are in financial straights; especially people who are older who are seeing their retirement savings vanish, and new homeowners who extended themselves too far into unmanageable mortgages in the reality of a falling real-estate market.  Many are facing bankruptcy because they have too much debt to bear.  Lots of us have health problems and don’t have health insurance to cover rising medical costs.  Some are in the middle of religious or political wars, dodging bullets and bombs, praying to stay alive.

How are you?  Really – how is your life?  Please post a comment and let us know about how you are struggling, and what you’ve learned recently.  Please write and tell us, so we know we’re not alone in our struggles and sacrifices.  I am with you, I too have to make a lot of sacrifices and make significant changes, I’m struggling with some of the same things everyone else is.

This Easter and Passover season, I’m thinking about how the two holidays are similar, teaching us to follow and depend on God 100%.  Easter to me is about Jesus Christ’s many sacrifices to teach us about God and how he gave His life and accepted the fate of being killed for His teaching about love, kindness and forgiveness.  God was there with Him, protecting Him, loving Him, allowing Him to ultimately transcend death.  Passover, for me, is all about following God and totally relying on Him against oppression and evil, sacrificing our own will so that we can follow God’s leading to the Promised Land of hope and peace.  Although different in history, both are rites of sacrifice, passage, and renewal in God’s hands.

These religious holidays are celebrated in springtime, the point in the season that the dead of winter is now over – last year’s crops are long gone back to the earth, and the seeds of hope are sprouting and living new life from old.

Easter and Passover teach us hope and renewal, in exchange for our love and sacrifices.  If we follow the path of faith and hope, instead of delving deeper into our sufferings and hopelessness, the promise of new life, of freedom from earthy mortality and limitations, is given us in abundance.  We don’t understand exactly how life from death may work; yet, it is ours miraculously, only for the price of giving up our suffering and sinful errors to God, trusting Him to show us the way to the Promised Land of salvation and infinite life anew.

Have you put your life in God’s hands?  Have you surrendered to faith and experienced renewal, new life and salvation?  Please tell us about it, so that we can also be reminded and renewed in God’s love.

Be sure to return to this post in the new few days and coming weeks, to see what others have written in response to you, and me.