Sunday Morning

 Sunday Morning

When Marc Brod was ten years old, he was given an assignment by his Reading teacher to read an interesting and unusual story.  It was about a Greek god named Sisyphus, who was given a most burdensome task.  That task was to push a massive boulder up to the top of a very high mountain, and if he could get it to the top, push it over the other side. Then and only then, could he forever be released from his burden.  But as it turned out, he was only able to make it up halfway before the boulder became just too heavy, and he started rolling backwards with it; about 100 yards or so.  He would push it back up 50 more yards, and then roll back down with it another 100.  50 more up, 100 more down.  On and on it went for all of eternity.  Steadily he declined into a deep dark abyss.

“This,” Marc’s teacher exclaimed to the class, “is the way life can feel sometimes.  But take heart!  There is a Sunday morning coming…”

“There is a Sunday morning coming?  What does he mean by that?” Marc thought.

It was nearing the end of November.  Thanksgiving had passed and the temperature outside was getting colder and colder.  The snow was beginning to fall too.  The spirit and joys of Christmas were upon Marc, his family and everybody at his school, along with much easier and more lighthearted reading assignments.  Marc was getting along quite well with everything and everybody.  Christmas cheer filled his whole life with the most unbounded happiness.  Family, school, friends, his grades, everything - he was a flourishing little boy.

But Christmas passed and the days began to get quite freezing.  People’s hearts began to grow cold as well, and for the first time in his life, Marc began to realize this.  His closest friends abandoned him for the kids they thought were “more cool,” and his teacher did not seem to show any care or concern for it.  For all of this, his grades also began to drop and when his parents saw his report card, they punished him and withdrew much of the love they normally showered him with. 

There were four cold months of winter; four very lonely and difficult months for Marc. He felt like he was suffocating under the weight of all the misfortune that had befallen him.  Until the beginning of May as the temperature outside began to warm, the flowers began to bloom, and the trees began to appear flush with beautiful shades of green, when a pretty young girl named Ashley began to notice him, pity him and befriend him.   The two of them became the best of friends and spent nearly every day together, during and after school. Ashley encouraged him to play with her friends (who were much nicer than his former friends who abandoned him) and to try harder in school so that his grades would improve.  All of this he did and his life began to be much more tolerable, even actually quite joyful.  His parents began to show him more love than they had in the past, and even his teacher praised him for his remarkable comeback.  One night while peacefully drifting off into sleep, he heard a voice inside of him softly say:  “Sunday morning is here…”  Marc instantly remembered the story of Sisyphus and his teacher’s words, “Take heart!  There is a Sunday morning coming…”  In that moment, he understood something about life, and he learned a very valuable lesson.

Life went on.  Marc would again have difficult times that were followed by times of incredible blessing.  Years went by.  The same cycles seemed to repeat themselves over and over again.  Until one day, he came to a point where he realized that time and chance would no longer be enough to sustain him.  He was experiencing something of a life crisis, like none other he had before experienced.  Only a miracle would get him out of this one, not just another turn of luck.  For a period of time, he was seriously thinking about death and the place he would go to after he died.  He was only twenty-five and a little young to be having such morbid thoughts…  but such are God’s dealings with men.  He could not get this idea of “death” out of his mind and he knew that merely going through the same cycles of joy and pain would never give him the answer to the conundrum that plagued his heart.  In all earnest, he felt like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the mountain, only to find himself hurling downward fast with it into the great abyss.  Even with all the moments of incredible joy he had experienced, he somehow knew that they would never be enough to stop his steady decline into the great abyss.  Weeks went by.  Still no solution.  Finally, from some quiet distant place, he heard a voice call out to him, “Are you longing for another Sunday morning?”  “Yes! Yes! I am desperate for just that!” Marc cried out.  “Then believe in my Son…” the voice said.  Right then Marc had the whole gospel message explained to his heart: how all people are sinners and how God loves everyone equally and has sent his son to die in their place, offering them salvation as a free gift.  “Will you accept my gift of love?” the voice asked him with the most indescribable tenderness.  His heart answered back in all sincerity, “Yes.”

 Marc then fell asleep and woke up the next morning with a joy and peace he had never known before.  It was a bright bright Sunday morning and never before had his heart been filled with so much hope.  “It is Sunday morning!” he exclaimed at the top of his lungs.  “It truly is Sunday morning…”

Marc thought that this blessed moment would go on for all of eternity, but life has a way of still being life, even for redeemed folks.  Many more a dark night he would have to face.  He would often feel like Sisphus again, trying once more to push the boulder up the mountain only to find himself quickly losing ground and going nowhere.  But even in these dark moments there was something in his soul that wasn’t there before.  It was like the sun that had shone on that brightest of Sunday mornings, was casting its rays into his loneliest, darkest, most painful places.  He somehow knew that he was never alone and would never be forsaken.  It was actually during these times, that the deepest work of all was being done in his soul, and they were always followed by mountaintop experiences where he seemed to understand everything just as God intended him to understand it.

Marc is now an old man, and a Sunday morning like none other awaits him, when he crosses over into the next life.  His eyes have not yet seen it yet, nor has his heart felt or comprehended it, but it has been promised to him, and it will surely outweigh his greatest earthly joy by a ratio mathematics has yet to figure out.  And it is the fate of all who lay down their burdens at the Cross.

“I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me, though he die, he shall live.”  John 11:25