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Tim Keller tells the following story about the power of Christ's resurrection:
A minister was in Italy, and there he saw the grave of a man who had died centuries before who was an unbeliever and completely against Christianity, but a little afraid of it too. So the man had a huge stone slab put over his grave so he would not have to be raised from the dead in case there is a resurrection from the dead. He had insignias put all over the slab saying, "I do not want to be raised from the dead. I don't believe in it." Evidently, when he was buried, an acorn must have fallen into the grave. So a hundred years later the acorn had grown up through the grave and split that slab. It was now a tall towering oak tree. The minister looked at it and asked, "If an acorn, which has power of biological life in it, can split a slab of that magnitude, what can the acorn of God's resurrection power do in a person's life?"
Keller comments:
The minute you decide to receive Jesus as Savior and Lord, the power of the Holy Spirit comes into your life. It's the power of the resurrection—the same thing that raised Jesus from the dead …. Think of the things you see as immovable slabs in your life—your bitterness, your insecurity, your fears, your self-doubts. Those things can be split and rolled off. The more you know him, the more you grow into the power of the resurrection.
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Photo taken [and edited] from a station of the cross in the Holy Name of Jesus church, Balik Pulau, Penang.
St Bartholomew's Church, Penn, Wolverhampton runs a Good Friday project for up to 100 school children.
This is one of their creations which is lighting up a dark corner.
Tissue paper glued on to the reverse of an acrylic sheet
The Via Crucis, Living Stations of the Cross, is an annual Good Friday tradition at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Dalton, Georgia, USA (a 5000 family, 90% Hispanic parish). They are a loving, faithful work of the people of the community, attended by thousands.
I took these pictures when I was pastor there from 2009 to 2022. I always tried to capture the crowds, the individuals, the faces, the emotions, and the pathos of the scenes, in addition to the photogenic and thematic contrasts, colors, textures, and just plain beauty of the scenes.
Over the years, you'll see the actors change and grow up, to the point where, by 2019, the kids who were babes in arms in the early years wanted to put on their own version (the last group of photos). Many of our special needs kids played a big role.
One of the actors who played Jesus went on to West Point and is now serving our country. Other young people in these photos went on to college, but came back to serve our community in various fields, including law and medicine.
Back then, I used a Nikon D40, then a Nikon D3200. These pictures have been enhanced for color and texture with Darktable software.