Matthew Jones, son of my friend David, died in February at the age of 29, after a four-year battle with neuroblastoma.
Matthew was raised as a Christian, but he never believed until one day, a few months before he died, when the pain of his cancer was so intense that it felt like nails being driven into his brain. At that point he had a vision of Jesus absorbing the nails into His own wounds. Matt became a believer.
Matt’s funeral was attended by 300, many of them young people who had never been to a church service, never heard the gospel. They heard it that day. If Matt could speak to us from heaven this Easter he would say to us all, “The Lord is risen! Yes, He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!”
Throughout his illness Matt kept a journal on Substack, the last chapter of which was called “Crucifixion Diary.” Shortly after his encounter with Jesus he wrote the following entry, which is as luminous as anything I’ve read in all the greatest spiritual writing.
Even if, just for a single moment, you open your heart to the idea of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection—as I have done for the very first time in my life (despite my entire religious upbringing)—something happens. For the first time, I allowed myself to imagine that someone, across time and space, long ago—someone I never truly cared about, never studied, never understood as an actual historical person—might have died for me.
And when I opened myself to that possibility, I was overwhelmed by love.
That love now exists in every moment: when I open my eyes, when I take a bite of food, when I close my eyes at night. It moves through every breath, every heartbeat, and I find myself saying thank you again and again. Because if this is true, then every second of my life is a gift from another being and I am eternally grateful for that.
If I can live each day remembering that I was given this life through grace, then maybe I can spend the rest of it giving that grace back to others, to the world, and to myself.
That, to me, is the beginning of the resurrection of the body.
Whether I die the moment I publish this, or whether I live to see another hundred years, I feel in the deepest part of my heart that I have at least been fortunate enough to glimpse through the doorway of being saved.
Amen.
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