Thoughts on an Easter Sunday, for what they're worth.

So, it's Easter.

Came home, went to service with the family. Everyone in our household went-- quite the event, let me assure you.

The service was, as always, unexpectedly rich and good. I don't really know this man my brother calls pastor, and he has different public speaking methods than maybe I'm used to enjoying (be it a pastor or other manner of public speaker), but even still.. the spirit always manages to use this man, and I love to hear the richness of these Sunday messages that he delivers to his congregation.

This Easter, he spoke about sorrow. What it is to experience sorrow, and the sorrow of the crucifixion. He explained it in a way that is very near to my heart at the moment-- there is a past, and there is a present, but there is no clear answer for the future. It is a paralyzing thing, sorrow, and there is no motivation to push toward a future that promises no hope, as far as the naked eye can see.

The death of Jesus left His friends and followers deeply wounded and devastated. Even amidst all the betrayal, all the wrong and injustice done, this man was the King of the Jews, the hope of the nations, like a brother to the disciples. With his death and burial seemed to be the death and burial of a promise, of hope and life itself. Who is this man, that would come to earth, and be used so clearly by God, to make all these great claims only to die? He died like any other man, and worse... like a criminal. He died a shameful death. What hope was there for these disciples, for these followers, then?

They could not see the third day coming. Never in a million years could they fathom the hope of all hopes that was coming in just a short while, to do more than they would ever understand.

I have not been able to see the third day, to really know its hope, as of late. Though God is working all around me, His immediate goodness now confuses me all the more because, well, it does not look the way that I want it to. I don't know where it's going, what lessons are to be learned, or what He has in store, but it all has me thinking, and still all the more knowing.. the third day comes, one way or the other-- ready or not.

I feel like Mary, the mother of Jesus, often gets overlooked on Easter. If she isn't she's depicted as she was in Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion; a woman mourning the painful loss of her earthly son. But what I don't often hear people mention stretches all the way back to the story of how Christ was born. The angel of the Lord came to her, met her, and told her that she would give birth to the son of God, and that he would be great, and that He would be called the Son of the Most High, that the Lord would give him the throne of David. The angel said He would reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom would never end. It came to pass, she conceived. The first promise fulfilled. She received a promise in the same way that Abraham had received a promise. The mother of faith as he was the father of nations. What did she feel, knowing what she knew-- being promised what she had been promised?

When you have a promise that you know is going to be fulfilled, and then something happens in such a devastating way as to alter your entire view of life, your entire state of being... what sorrow do you know? Hope deferred makes the heart sick, as proverbs says, and what sorrow, yes, as an earthly mother, but also one who had met with God, been visited by angels, chosen and promised something that she didn't ever expect or ask for. Yet even for her the third day came-- and how much sweeter, how much truer was that to her? Though she could not know, a deep knowing... how much greater her happiness?

All this is to say, I know the promises I've been given. How much greater, how much sweeter, knowing that whatever's to be, the third day came in a very literal way and came then to come now, again and again, showing truth and grace again and again all by the power of that one act that echoes as a promise to eternity.

I'm not saying everything will be perfect in the sense that it will all end the way I expect it to. I am saying that there is hope, and simply because I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel doesn't mean it's not there, or that it isn't coming just the same... whatever it looks like, it will come. It already has, and it already is.