Gethsemane

Oh Jerusalem...

For this post I'm borrowing part of Mandy's piece 'Bittersweet' about experiencing the Garden of Gethsemane. Mandy read this in our talent show and I thought it was so moving.

The Garden of Gethsemane was just a garden. There was the ground and the olive trees that reached toward the sky. Some rocks and bushes. But it was just a garden. Yet they were there. The same place where their Savior and Redeemer had bled from every pore. The very place where the Christ of the World had atoned for every sin, for every pain, from a paper cut to the 6 million ancestors of the people in that very land who had been slain at the hands of the Holocaust. The Savior felt them all, the afflictions of the victims and the transgressions of the predators. The excitement of being in that very location rivaled with the knowledge of what took place there so many years ago, what had begun the common era, Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. The experience of being there so full and rich, the comprehension of what had taken place so horrible and yet, so great: the atonement, the garden, the testifying spirit can only be explained as bittersweet.