Reflection

I started this post a few days ago and let it slip, but I've decide to go ahead and post it.

What Easter Means to Me:

An empty cross, a barren tomb.
What once was no longer is.
Shattered dreams, relinquished promises
Things not yet understood remain.

Hope. New Hope. Better Hope. Complete Hope.
Resplendent dreams, Ultimate Promises.
Renewed Life. A New Creation.
Not just remade, but made new.

What once was sorrow is now joy.
No longer scared but empowered.
It was all true, and still carries on.

He defeated death to give me life.
I have nothing to offer but humility.
Careful obedience of a life in one direction.
I am alive because he first died to save me.


I sense Easter in a different way this year. I am coming off of three years of almost dead faith. Even before Rwanda I was hollow and sad. The walls keeping me from God too tall for me to even see. They blended into the landscape, they had become permanent to me.

But God does not leave us. It is the one constant I always have - I am never alone.

I am walking back, coming home. I will not bow like the prodigal son, though I do not deserve the fatten calf any more than he did. I am embraced and held by a Father who loves me, who whispered truth to me in my time away, who managed to beat down the wall that kept us apart, and give me instead a place of safety, intimacy and rest.

I am a new creation - new! Not just cleaned up, or rebuilt, or fixed-up, but new. It's an amazing gift, a life-sustaining promise, one I am just starting to understand.

So what does Easter mean to me? Everything.