The night before Jesus died he had dinner with his closest followers. That “last supper” gave rise to what we know of as the Eucharist (also called the Lord’s Supper and Holy Communion). Christians have often gathered on Thursday of Holy Week, called Maundy Thursday, to commemorate this important event and its lasting import to us. 

In these strange times, I have found comfort in reading John the Apostle. Not his accounts of strange creatures and odd visions that sound more like the Walking Dead or something from the Matrix, but the Gospel of John. John's account of the life of Jesus is apocalyptic in another sense—in John's same poetic language, his account of Jesus' life disrupts how I see the world, and in the person of Jesus, remakes creation.

City Church planned this waiting series before we fully grasped how drastically our lives would change over this Lenten season. At this point, I often wonder what I am waiting for each day. Am I waiting for more bad news, or will there be something hopeful? Am I waiting for something as simple as a check in text from friends I see regularly? Back in early March, when I said I would take this week's blog in our five-part series on Jesus' last days and write about how Jesus was stranded in the garden by his friends, I had no idea how relevant that term "stranding" would feel to our present reality.

9/11 is the only event I can remember that comes close to resembling our current crisis. Contrary to what my elementary students think, I do not have first-hand knowledge of World War I or World War II. I'm old, but I'm not that old!
At our church I was responsible for leading the Bible study that followed 9/11. For this Bible study, we went back to the source. We read Bible verses, talked about how they applied to us, and we prayed.