Happy Easter! With the dawning of Easter morning we bid farewell to the season of Lent for another year, and so the Lent blog draws to a close.

We hope you have enjoyed reading the different perspectives, stories, quotes and encounters each day. Why not take some time now to read over some of the previous blogs you might have missed? Thanks to everyone who has taken part- we hope it has been an enjoyable and thought-provoking experience for you too.

For Christians, the cross is central to everything we believe. That we can worship a God of complete transformation, a God who defeated death itself and thereby made it possible for everyone to know Him, is only believeable if we first encounter and understand the cross.

The cross is the ultimate symbol of human suffering, and in our work with asylum seekers, suffering is a word many are all too familiar with. But into that suffering- the cross speaks. And it speaks of a beauty and redemption and hope beyond measure.

Hallelujah! We leave you with these wise and wonderful words of John Stott, who said:

“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. 'The cross of Christ ... is God’s only self-justification in such a world” as ours....' 'The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.”

― John R.W. Stott, Cross