Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone! I remember as a kid, the excitement of waking up Easter morning to the sight of Easter baskets full of chocolate and jelly beans and Easter eggs... I mean, next to Halloween, it's one of the larger candy hauls a kid can get! Christmas stockings, in our family, probably just edged out Easter baskets by sheer volume, but the oversized solid chocolate easter bunnies... wow. Ours sometimes had the ears missing thanks to my father. But nonetheless, Easter and Christmas mornings were always filled with an extraordinary excitement, anticipation, and pure joy. 

I often wonder, now, how the disciples felt when they recognized Jesus after He'd risen. Or Mary and Joseph upon His birth. Neither one could happen without the other. I don't even think these two events can be classified in a cause and effect narrative. Though we perceive these events chronologically, their necessity and fulfillment were designed simultaneously, from our first existence, after what Christians call "The Fall". Whether you're Christian or not, a strong believer or not, the arc of the love story told in the Bible and carried through tradition for millennia is quite a masterpiece to behold. For those of us that are "all in", it is the story of the source and summit of our existence, ever teaching, unchanging, and the answer to all suffering in this world. It is difficult to understand, more difficult to choose to try, and yet the most rewarding journey to be on. And I say this in the face of my reality as a parent who's lost children, as a person struggling through a horrifically debilitating terminal disease, and as one who was in the darkness. There, long before choosing to reconcile my narrow minded, obstinate, exclusively scientific world view. 

Easter morning, like Christmas morning, happens every morning I get to wake up. But I have to keep reminding myself of that. It's an easy feeling to tuck away and only bring out two times a year. But I can't help to think that Mary and Joseph and those other first disciples felt that childlike pure joy on their first Christmas and Easter. And they didn't even have chocolate bunnies. Whatever your disposition, I wish all of you a most joy filled Easter!