After the supper in the upper room Jesus led his disciples to the Mount of Olives. He told them that they would leave him that very night. Peter protested that he would never fall away from Jesus or disown him. All the other disciples said the same. Jesus took them to Gethsemane and left them to pray. He took Peter and James and John aside and said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”

Jesus said “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these other things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33) and “ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Matthew 7:7). The apostles continued this emphasis when they encouraged believers to “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

The gospel is the good news of salvation, or the good news of our Savior Christ Jesus. It is about what God has done for us in Christ before the beginning of time which has now been revealed to us in the life of Christ. It is good news because God has done for us what we could not do for ourselves. This is what grace means. It is an undeserved gift. God purposed to give us this gift of salvation before we were born, before history, before time, in eternity.

I felt out of sorts. I would put on different colored socks, roll the garbage cans to the curb on the wrong day, misplace the car keys, sometimes confuse the red and green lights of a traffic signal, be tempted to drink too much, sleep fitfully. People were patient with me. I would show up for work, do daily obligations participate in conversations as well as social engagements. Yet, frequently I looked off into space as if trying to figure out the words of a song on a radio in another room.