April 2023

Our Redeemer Lutheran Church Fear hits people in many different ways. Worries and anxieties are at one end of this scale, terror and desper‐ation at the other. We use all sorts of coping mechanisms to deal with fear — height‐ened or reduced activity, good or bad changes to our diet, chemicals to cover things up, media distrac‐tions, exercise or work, hob‐bies (this list can go on). What we can often not do is get to the root of the fear; all these means are ways to push the fear into the back‐ground as we try desper‐ately to not notice it. Yet it is still there, and is a weight on us affecting how we think, feel, and live.

I know we just cele‐brated the resurrection of Christ, or what many call Easter, but I would like to remind each of us of one specific truth: The cross of Jesus was no accident. The crucifixion of Jesus was not the result of some panicking cosmological engineer.