Daily Devotional (GPS)

I’ll be honest with you. I’ve spent a lot of my life not saying the hard thing. Keeping the peace. Protecting the room. Telling myself that quiet was the same thing as kind. But silence has a cost too. And this Sunday, walking through Holy Monday together, is making me sit with that in a way I can’t ignore.

Because Holy Monday is uncomfortable. And this year, it feels even more so.

I turn on the news, and I hear stories about people being treated as less than. I read about people being dismissed, dehumanized, cast aside… told they don’t matter, told they don’t belong, told there is no place for them. And honestly? That breaks my heart. Because God sees every single person on this planet. Every one of us worthy. Every one of us loved. Every one of us his.

Monday of Holy Week is the day Jesus walks into the temple and finds chaos. Money changers. Merchants. A sacred space turned into a marketplace. And he doesn’t look the other way. He doesn’t stay quiet.

He flips the tables.

What we sometimes miss about that moment is where it happened. The money changers had set up shop in the outer courts, the Court of the Gentiles. The only place in the entire temple where outsiders were welcome. Foreigners. People who didn’t belong in the inner courts. The “wrong” kind of people. And the religious leaders had turned that space into commerce and chaos, and no one seemed to notice or care that the ones most affected were the ones with the least power to do anything about it. Jesus noticed.

His anger wasn’t impulsive. It was protective. He wasn’t just upset about bad business practices… he was furious that the one place meant for everyone had been taken from the people who needed it most. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” All. Not some. Not the ones who have it together. Not the ones who look right or come from the right place or have the right history. All.

I’ve been watching our world grow more divided and more painful with each passing week. More polarized. More cruel, sometimes. And I find myself doing what feels safe… staying quiet, being careful, protecting the peace. But I’m starting to wonder if the peace I’ve been protecting is real.

Because somewhere along the way, “don’t offend anyone” started to feel less like wisdom and more like fear. Fear that if I say something true, I’ll lose something. A relationship. A seat at the table. Someone’s approval. And so, I’ve stayed quiet while people I love, people God loves, have been pushed to the margins. While those without a voice have gone unheard. While the “wrong kind” of people have been told, in ways subtle and not so subtle, that they don’t belong.

That’s not loving my neighbor. That’s just a quieter kind of complicity. I came across this recently from author Holley Gerth, in a devotional on bible.com, and it made me pause.

“Three hundred and sixty thousand people will arrive on this earth today. Some will depart. The other seven billion of us will go about our business — catching flights, rocking babies, showing up for work, and eating birthday cake. And God will watch over it all. Every coming and going. Every beginning and end. Every dream come true and heartbreak… This is what’s true about your future, no matter what fear tries to tell you: God will be there. You will be loved. Nothing will be too much for him.” That’s not a distant, disengaged God watching from somewhere far away. That’s the same God who walked into the temple on Monday. The same God who is in it… every coming and going, every person arriving on this earth today, every person being told they don’t belong.

He sees them. He loves them. He is not absent. And neither should I be.

I don’t have a clean ending for this. I wish I did. What I have is a question. What am I doing? When I see someone being treated as less than, do I speak? When the room goes quiet because something uncomfortable is true, do I stay quiet too? When people are being hurt, really hurt, and no one is speaking up for them, do I say something?

I feel inadequate. I feel like one person with one small voice in an enormous, overwhelming world. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe feeling inadequate is just what it feels like to finally be paying attention. What I keep coming back to, even in the middle of all of this heaviness, is that we are not at the end of the story. Holy Monday is real. The tension is real. The tables being flipped, the chaos, the growing opposition that will eventually lead to a cross… all of it is real. And it hurts. 

But we know what Sunday brings. The same Jesus who stood in the middle of the mess, who reached out his arms for the overlooked and the marginalized and the ones the world had written off… that Jesus wins. Love wins. The tomb doesn’t get the last word. And that means every small act of courage, every time we choose to speak when silence would be easier, every time we extend love to someone the world has decided isn’t worth it… it matters. It’s part of the story that ends in resurrection.

We’re not there yet. But we’re headed there.

May you find the courage this week to let Holy Monday do its work in you. May the table-flipping Jesus unsettle something that needs to be unsettled. May you feel the weight of these days… not to be crushed by it, but to be changed by it. And when the world feels divided and out of control, may you remember what drove Jesus into that temple on Monday. People in power had taken the one place where the outsider, the foreigner, the “wrong kind” of person could come to God… and taken it from them. Jesus saw it. And he acted. When we see the vulnerable pushed further to the margins, when we see those without a voice go unheard, we are not seeing something new. We are seeing something Jesus recognized immediately. And responded to. May that same love stir something in you. Love fierce enough to act. To show up. To speak up. To stand beside the ones who have no one standing beside them. To refuse to look away.

Because here’s what I know to be true, even on the darkest days… we are not at the end of the story. The God who flipped the tables on Monday is the same God who walked out of the tomb on Sunday. And that same God is still here, still moving, still loving this broken and beautiful world… and every single person in it. Including you. Including me.