Last Sunday of Epiphany: A Valentine Invitation

 

 

Come to me… and I will give you rest.

    Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me…

    and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy,

    and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28&30)

 

Epiphany ends with a Valentine Invitation—a love card that comes from God’s side. To know and love Jesus is to know and love the whole of God.  

I thought of Jesus’ Invitation this last week when spending a few days with our long time medical missionary friends. While serving in a mission hospital in Kijabe, Kenya, our oldest granddaughter, with her own medical hopes, spent time with them to observe their medical work. She tells us of what a wonder it was to be with them.

We met our friends, “with all our road before us” (Dymer, Lewis), while attending Piedmont Alliance Church. He was a young physician at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland and I a seminary student in Mill Valley while serving as the youth pastor at that same church. Odd how our paths crossed: He attended Stanford, I attended Simpson—only some 30 miles apart, but on the academic spectrum, miles and miles apart. Church brought us together. Jesus does that.

We both ended up serving the church: I/we as a pastor and he/her as a medical missionary (you can’t do such work without one’s spouse). We both yoked up with Jesus, and discovered that his yoke is easy, and his burden is light. Not that the burden isn’t heavy—we spoke of difficult times. But somehow, in retrospect, Jesus’ heavy burden is light; and his demanding yoke is freeing.