Reflections

The Power of Love

Christ has conquered death. He lived life fully and showed us how to do the same. He suffered like we suffer, resisted temptation like we resist it, loved like we’re called to love. And then he died. And then he rose.

And that changes everything.

Not because we get a free pass now. Not because our lives suddenly get easy. But because death isn’t the last word anymore. Because evil isn’t the final answer. Because God’s faithfulness is deeper and stronger than everything that wants to crush us.

This is the promise of Easter. Not that we won’t suffer. Jesus suffered. But that suffering doesn’t have the power to destroy what matters. That love is stronger than death. That faithfulness lasts beyond the grave.

When you’re facing something hard—when you’re sick, when you’re grieving, when you’re facing loss—you need that promise. You need to know that this isn’t all there is. That God hasn’t abandoned you. That even in the darkest part, even in death itself, God’s love is at work.

And here’s the thing: Jesus showed us that. He didn’t explain it from a distance. He came and lived it and died it and rose from it. He met us in the place where we’re most afraid. And he came out the other side.

That’s the hope we cling to. Not everything working out fine. But God being faithful through everything. That’s enough. That has to be enough, because anything less wouldn’t be real hope. It would just be wishful thinking.

Easter is fifty days long in the church calendar. We don’t pack it up and leave. We keep asking what it means that Christ rose. We keep letting it change how we live. Because if death doesn’t have the last word, then how we live right now actually matters.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope
The Heart of Prayer (Psalm 102)

We had some kids come forward to commit their lives to Christ, and one of them was our UPS delivery guy. DJ Light. You know him. Probably didn’t know he was wrestling with that until he was ready.

And I looked at these young people and I thought about what we’re doing here. This church has made a difference in the lives of a lot of young people over the years. A lot. And that matters. It matters right now and it’s going to matter for the rest of their lives.

When kids are growing up, they’re looking for something real. They’re not looking for adults to be perfect. They’re looking for us to be honest. To actually mean what we say. To show up when it’s inconvenient. To keep showing up.

These three young people made a choice. They said yes to Jesus. Not because they’re perfect, not because they’ve got it all figured out, but because they saw something here worth saying yes to. And that’s the miracle. Not that they’re suddenly fixed. But that they’re willing to give their lives to something bigger than themselves.

If you know these kids, love them. Pray for them. That’s not just nice sentiment. That’s them needing to feel that they’re part of something. Because they are. They’re part of the body of Christ, and they’re going to need us to remind them of that when things get hard.

This is why the church exists. Not to run programs. Not to fill seats. But to help young people see that there’s a God who loves them, and that their lives can mean something. That it’s worth the risk to say yes.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope
The Heart of Prayer (Psalm 32)

We are here for God. Not the other way around.

That’s a line from one of our anthems, and it caught me this week. Because most of us have it backwards. We come to church, we come to God, and we’re really thinking about what we need. What we want. What we hope God will do for us. And we turn our lives upside down in the process.

We forget sometimes that we exist for God. That the whole thing works because God made us for a purpose beyond ourselves. You’d think that would be depressing, right? But it’s actually the most freeing thing there is.

When you understand that you’re here for God—not that God’s here to fix your life like some cosmic customer service—everything shifts. The things that seem like the biggest problems don’t control you the same way. The disappointments don’t hit the same. Because you’re anchored to something bigger than your comfort or your success or even your happiness.

And the crazy thing is, when you quit demanding that God make you happy, you actually become happier. Because you start noticing what’s actually good. You start being a blessing instead of always looking for one. You start giving instead of keeping score.

That’s what it means to be blessed—not getting what you want, but understanding that you’ve been given something worth more than that. Understanding that you have something to give. And starting to give it.

We are here for God. Let that sink in. Not here for what we can get. Here because we belong to something sacred. Here because we have work to do. Real work. The kind that lasts.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope
The Heart of Prayer

I want to talk about my grandmother. She had a condition called tic douloureux—it’s a nerve condition in your face that causes excruciating pain. Not the kind that kills you, just the kind that feels like it’s killing you. She lived with that for thirty years, from her early sixties all the way to ninety.

And I watched her have these attacks. Just wracked with pain, her face going through it. Finally found a doctor, found some medicine that helped. But one time when I was down at her house, she said something that broke my heart. She wondered what she’d done that God was punishing her for.

And I said, “No. You know better than that.” Because that’s what we’d been taught. That’s what the world taught us back then. If something’s wrong with you, you did something to deserve it. If you’re sick, it’s your fault.

Psalm 38 is raw. It’s a person detailing every way they’re falling apart. Arrows have pierced me. Nothing in my body isn’t broken. My wounds reek. It’s graphic. It’s real pain. And woven all through it is this terrible awareness that people think it’s his own fault.

Those who were near me now stay far away. Those who want me dead lay traps. People muttering lies all day long. So here’s a person who’s devastated physically, and then everyone’s gathering like buzzards, looking for an opening, convinced he brought this on himself.

We do that, don’t we. When somebody’s down—sick, in crisis, struggling—something in us wants to figure out what they did to get there. Not so we can help. So we can make sure we don’t do it. So we can be safer. And people back away. They stop visiting. They assume the person can’t respond anyway, so why bother. And isolation piles on top of misery.

But the psalm ends different. Waiting for God. Come quickly and help me. It’s not pretty resolution. It’s just—I’m still here. I’m still reaching. And I’m still waiting for God to show up.

That’s the thing we miss sometimes. When somebody’s in it, they don’t need our judgment. They need our presence. They need to know that even when they can’t respond, they’re not abandoned. That’s where God is in the middle of this—not as the one punishing, but as the one refusing to leave.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope
The Heart of Prayer (Psalms 6)

You know that old country song? “I’ve got tears in my ears from lying on my bed crying over you.” That’s what Psalm 6 is. A person wringing out the couch every night, sick and desperate, calling out to God.

This is one of the penitential psalms—those raw prayers where people are falling apart. The psalmist starts: please Lord, don’t punish me when you’re angry. Don’t discipline me when you’re furious. And all I thought was, yeah, that’s actually good parenting advice. Don’t punish when you’re mad. Because then it’s your anger coming out, not real discipline. It’s just harm. And this person, whoever wrote Psalm 6, they’re already suffering. They don’t need wrath on top of it.

The thing that struck me is how thoroughly they’re falling apart. Have mercy on me because I’m frail. My bones are shaking. My whole body is completely terrified. We like to think we’re strong, don’t we? We think we’re invincible. But the truth is we’re all frail. Sometimes it just takes getting sick to realize it.

And here’s what got me—the psalmist is sick, and not only that, but other people are piling on. There’s this blame floating around: if you’re sick, it’s your fault. You sinned, you didn’t pray hard enough, you didn’t believe strongly enough. We knew this back then. Even today you get drifts of it, that spiritual blame. And when you’re already down, people coming at you with that—it just does more damage.

But then the psalmist says something that stopped me. “But you, Lord.” Just like that. Not “but I hope” or “but I think maybe.” It’s a statement of confidence in the middle of everything falling apart. But you, Lord. How long will this last? Come back to me. Deliver me for the sake of your faithful love. Not because I’ve earned it—the psalmist knows better than that. But because you are faithful. Because you love me.

That’s the whole thing, isn’t it. When we’re completely undone, that’s when we need to remember God’s steadfast, stubborn love. Not our strength. Not our righteousness. Just God showing up.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope
The Power of Love

Something shifted for me this week. I was sitting with someone who’s dealing with a genuinely terrible situation. Bad health news. Uncertain future. And instead of offering comfort or advice or theological platitudes, I just sat there. We both just sat there.

And it hit me that’s what faith is, a lot of the time. Not having answers. Not being able to fix it. Just showing up. Just staying present when everything in you wants to run.

That’s what the cross is, I think. That’s why Jesus went through with it. Not because he was earning something. Not because God needed payment. But because the only way to show humanity that God is actually committed to us is to die with us. To sit in that worst darkness and say: I’m here too.

We live in a culture that’s obsessed with fixing everything. Taking control. Managing outcomes. And the cross is the ultimate sign that you can’t. You can’t control suffering. You can’t fix death. You can’t engineer your way to love.

All you can do is be present. All you can do is choose to love people in their mess instead of waiting for them to clean up their act. All you can do is show up.

For someone out there, that’s revolutionary. Because you’ve spent your whole life being told you’re not good enough. You have to achieve. You have to perform. You have to become different. And here’s Jesus saying: No. I’m enough. My love is enough. Your presence matters. You matter.

Just as you are. Especially as you are. All that broken, messy, still-figuring-it-out version of you. That’s the one I came for.

That’s the gospel. That’s enough.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope
The Heart of Prayer

Ash Wednesday. The day we mark ourselves with dirt and admit the obvious thing nobody wants to talk about: we’re going to die. All of us. Even people we think are permanent. Even people we think are invincible.

There’s something holy about that honesty. Something that cuts through all the noise about self-improvement and success and getting ahead. Because none of it matters if we’re not transforming into people who actually know how to love.

I was thinking about that. About what Jesus meant when he said to take up our cross. We’ve made it sound masochistic—like we’re supposed to suffer. But what if it just means: stop running. Stop pretending. Stop trying to avoid the hard parts of loving God and loving people.

That’s the real cross. Not literal suffering. But the death of pretense. The death of protecting yourself from being actually known. The death of thinking you can be safe if you just work hard enough, achieve enough, manage enough.

Lent’s coming. Forty days of choosing, over and over, to be real. To let go of something you’re holding too tight. To face the parts of yourself you’d rather ignore.

And here’s the gift nobody talks about: that actually sets you free. Not in some magical way. But because you stop spending all your energy keeping yourself from falling apart. You just… fall apart. You admit it. You let God meet you there.

That’s the whole point. You’re not good enough to earn God’s love. And God loves you anyway. And that changes everything.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope
The Heart of Prayer (Psalm 50)

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to be a good person all the time. From believing that spiritual maturity means having it mostly figured out. From thinking that following Jesus means becoming less flawed, less angry, less human.

I’ve been noticing how many of our best people are burning out. And it’s not usually because they’re doing too much. It’s because they’re splitting themselves in half. Public self and private self. Spiritual self and emotional self. The person at church and the person at home.

What if wholeness actually requires integration? What if the real spiritual work is not becoming a better version of yourself, but becoming more honestly yourself?

I think about Jesus flipping tables in the temple. Jesus getting annoyed at the disciples for being dense. Jesus not always being calm and understanding. We’ve created this version of Jesus that’s never actually frustrated, never actually angry, never actually human. And then we try to be like that impossible version.

But the real Jesus—the one in Scripture—is fully present in his anger, in his grief, in his exhaustion. He doesn’t transcend his humanity. He sanctifies it. He shows us that being human is not the problem. Being dishonest about your humanity—that’s where we get stuck.

So what if spiritual maturity looked like this: More honesty. Less performance. More integration of your actual life. Less splitting yourself into acceptable and unacceptable parts. More bringing your whole self to church, to your relationships, to your prayers.

That would be revolutionary. And a lot less exhausting.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope
The Power of Love (Philippians 414)

February is when everyone’s New Year’s resolution crashes. The gym gets empty again. The journal sits blank. And we start with the shame. “I can’t even keep one resolution.” “I’m undisciplined.” “Why do I always fail?”

But what if the problem isn’t you? What if it’s that we’re trying to accomplish transformation through sheer willpower, and willpower isn’t actually how human beings change?

I’ve been reading about how change actually works. And it’s never “I decided to change and then I did.” It’s way messier. It’s community. It’s naming patterns. It’s being honest about what you actually want versus what you think you should want. It’s sometimes failing spectacularly and then trying again.

The theological word for this is grace, but we’ve made it so thin. We treat grace like a one-time get-out-of-jail card. “I messed up, Jesus forgave me, moving on.” But that’s not what grace is. Grace is God’s power working with you over time. Not erasing your struggle. Accompanying you through it.

So here’s what I’d offer for whatever you’re failing at right now: stop trying harder. Get honest about what’s actually stopping you. Talk to someone about it. Stop pretending you should be able to do this alone. Because transformation is never a solo project. It’s always community. It’s always encountering the God who doesn’t love you for getting it right, but loves you exactly where you’re getting it wrong.

That’ll change you far more than willpower ever could.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope
The Heart of Prayer (Psalm 111)

I’m thinking about how we use busyness to avoid actually living. You know—staying so occupied with church stuff and family stuff and work stuff that we never actually have to look at anything hard inside ourselves.

One of the things that’s becoming clearer to me is how many of us learned, way back in childhood, to deal with pain by just… not dealing with it. By moving on. By finding something else to do. And we spiritualize it. “God wants us to be joyful.” “Don’t let sadness control you.” And before you know it, you’re sixty years old and you’ve never actually grieved anything.

The spiritual work—the real work—is going the other direction. Letting yourself feel what you actually feel. Sitting with anger. Sitting with grief. Sitting with confusion about God. Not because that’s the goal. But because you have to know what’s in there before you can let God heal it.

I see people do this in churches sometimes, and the reaction is immediate: “Well, that’s worldly psychology.” No. That’s Jesus. Jesus sat with his grief. Jesus felt his anger. Jesus didn’t skip over the hard feelings to get to the resurrection message.

If you’ve been taught your whole life that emotions are dangerous, that feelings mean you don’t trust God, that a good Christian is a happy one—that’s a lie worth examining. That’s a script worth questioning. Because wholeness isn’t about feeling better. It’s about being honest. It’s about bringing your whole self to God instead of just the acceptable parts.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope