A Beautiful, Terrible Day – This is our annual Shrove Tuesday Jazz Mass, a celebration before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.  Aimee Baxter, our Pastor of Young Adults delivers the Communion Meditation, and she begins by giving a number of examples of someone being up, then down.  It is much like we will experience with this Shrove Tuesday of celebration and then tomorrow’s Ash Wednesday.  The scripture is the Markan version of the baptism of Jesus wherein we read about Jesus’ baptism by John, then his coming up out of the water to feel the heavens open and hear the voice of God calling him beloved.  But in the writer of Mark’s usual fashion of brevity, the Spirit “immediately” sends Jesus into the wilderness for forty days of deprivation.  In some ways it is the ultimate beautiful, terrible day.  Yet it is clear that Jesus is sustained in the wilderness by the knowledge that he is the beloved of God, and that is a lesson for us, too.  That we are beloved of God should sustain us in those difficult times.