Spring is beginning to show signs of new life on the Avery Campus. After a long and cold winter season in the high country, I can sense the excitement for spring from our residents, staff, and in the natural world surrounding us too. Our playgrounds are bustling with laughter and games. Children are zipping around campus on their bicycles. The community is gathering to play field games and to savor the longer daylight hours.
A Season of Growth
Spring is a season that does not rush. Instead, spring unfolds, day-by-day and step-by-step. God’s creation provides us with a gentle reminder that just like spring, relationships and connections also unfold through time. At Crossnore, our work is often centered around building trusting relationships that are new and unsteady at first. We receive new residents, new employees come onto our team, and new community supporters are engaging with our organization each and every day. Spring reminds us that we grow together in our work to provide hope and healing and authentic relationships with the people in our lives each and every day.
Repairing and Renewing
Spring reminds us of repair–of growing something new out of something that is broken. Just as we tend the soil in our community garden, we also tend to the needs of our community in meaningful ways. One of our big spring projects this year has been to tune up, repair, and maintain our bicycles for our residents. Through this project, our Spiritual Life and Recreation student workers are learning vital skills for their own lives while helping to keep our bicycle program sustainable and safe.
Creating Together During Holy Week
On the Avery Campus, spring is a time to co-create–with God and with one another. During the weeks leading up to Easter, our residents and staff have been creating an art installation of the Stations of the Cross. We have worked together to weave colors illustrating the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, through coloring posters provided by Illustrated Children’s Ministry and designed by Adam Walker Cleveland.
The Stations of the Cross will be on display during Holy Week and through the season of Easter in the Sloop Chapel. Feel free to engage in this art work if you are visiting the Ben Long Fresco in our chapel.
Additional Info: There is an old legend that says, after the death and resurrection of Jesus, his mother Mary would often walk the way her son had walked on his journey to the cross, pausing here and there to recall something that had happened at that spot. From these walks grew the early Christian practice of walking the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross, in Jerusalem, a tradition that continues to this day. When they returned home, those early pilgrims to Jerusalem talked about their experiences, and soon many people began erecting “stations” of the cross on the walls and grounds of their own churches so worshippers could make the journey whenever they wished.
In recent years however, Christians of many traditions have been re-discovering this ancient devotional practice. The story of Jesus’ final hours, traditionally called the Passion, is the central story in each of the four gospels. It is a story we are all familiar with and yet, each gospel writer tells it from a different perspective. These coloring posters and sheets, along with the accompanying scriptures, use all four gospel accounts to tell the story of Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection.
Jesus’ own journey to the cross did not take place down some sacred street. Rather, his journey is what made each step, each cobblestone, sacred and filled with the Divine. At first glance, a large coloring poster might not seem like the most obvious place to meditate on these final hours of Jesus’ life. But it is our hope that, by coloring them and talking about them outside of our traditional “sacred spaces”, we can recognize that every place is an opportunity for an encounter with Christ along our own journey of faith.
About the designer: ADAM WALKER CLEVELAND is an artist, entrepreneur, pastor, pastor’s spouse, and father of four (two living). Adam graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary with a Master of Divinity and a Master of Arts in Youth Ministry, and has served churches in Idaho, California, Oregon and Illinois. After doing youth ministry for over 15 years, Adam founded Illustrated Children’s Ministry, and loves providing the church and families with creative, illustrated resources.
