Easter is nearly here and as much as I don’t want to be misunderstood for saying this, my feelings about this holiday are a bit conflicted.
Certainly, the thing I am most grateful for in my life is the truth we celebrate at Easter—the amazing, saving grace of God. God’s mission to rescue us hinged on the atoning death and glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that reality defines and determines my life.
Nevertheless, for me, Easter arrives each year with a few pieces of baggage—baggage that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime.
First, the ridiculous…
I have many good childhood memories of Easter—chocolate bunnies, those stinky egg-dyeing kits, and the first hope each year that the gray winter in frosty Indiana might actually end. But Easter also meant wearing extra-foofy church clothes, and I hated that.
I was a hardcore little tomboy and dreaded wearing any kind of special Easter attire to church. I thought it seriously damaged my “street cred” among the neighborhood boys who were my sports buddies.
My early childhood was spent in the ’60s, when ladies wore hats and little girls wore whatever their moms made them wear. One Easter, my mom decided I needed to wear a hat to church.
It was awful. I would gladly have crawled into any hole that might have mercifully opened up for me. I spent that whole church service praying only and fervently that Shorty and my other pals wouldn’t see me.
It’s ridiculous, I know, but I still sometimes feel a wee bit anxious when I know I’m expected to dress in certain ways that really aren’t “me.” I’m sure that is part of the reason I feel so at home in a church where I can wear blue jeans if I want to. (If you presently feel the urge to cast stones at me, please lower your rocks and take some deep, cleansing breaths.)
And it’s also why I feel so at home with Jesus, who cares a whole lot more about who we are than what we wear.
I admit that the Easter hat incident is an incredibly lame “traumatic holiday memory” story, but I have another troubling, personal Easter issue that is certainly more profound.
Here it is: While I can’t even find words to express how deeply I appreciate and embrace the redemption that sprung from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, I hate to read, hear or think about how it all happened.
I need to think about it, and I do think about it, but I don’t like to.
Reading about the trial and crucifixion of Jesus always makes me feel sick—the relentless mocking, the gruesome whipping, the blood, the nails, the pain, the unimaginably horrific price Jesus paid for me.
I am so grateful for it…and so incredibly sorry for it.
I wish that we—mankind—could have been better, could have been good enough not to need redemption, but we weren’t. We aren’t. I’m not.
Even after all these years, I just cannot be good enough to deserve a smidgen of God’s forgiveness or love. I can’t be good enough for even one day. Not even for an hour. Okay, not even for a minute.
In fact, I need redemption every. single. second.
I hammer nails in the hands of Jesus over and over and over…and He just keeps loving me anyway.
The conflicting, bittersweet, humbling, transcending, incomprehensible wonder of Easter just doesn’t seem fair. God is so getting the short end of the stick.
The Father gives His perfect Son, Jesus gives Himself…and they get, what? Me. You. Us.
And somehow, that’s okay with Him.
I have so very much to learn about that Easter kind of love.