Easter Hope Ponderings...

Easter Hope thoughts to share below....

 

  Lent is 40 days. Easter runs 50. This matters. While Lent blocks the exit for those chipper souls who’ve never seen a sorrow they couldn’t deny, Easter opens the floodgates on parched souls who’ve come to believe only in a life barren and brittle. But – and this is what we must not miss – Easter trumps Lent. Lent owns its grey space, and the good news is no good news at all if we do not sincerely wrangle with the sad facts scattered about us. But then Easter comes and flips on the sunshine and cranks up the jukebox and opens the windows and breaks out the margaritas.Death is very real, Easter says, but Jesus alive is more real. Get up and dance. Easter does not arrive as a joy easy won. Easter is the dance of the mourner who has grabbed the alleluia in a headlock and won’t let go. In Easter, those who dwell in the valley of the shadow of death gather up their courage and bend their ear to the Church’s witness of the risen Jesus. Then, in an act both brave and costly, these reckless souls let the light in. They open themselves to another possibility. They slowly start to tap their toe. With all their might, no matter how fragile or sparse, they begin to practice joy. They begin to Easter.

-Winn Collier

"Give us courage to live in a world we cannot fix

with hope that it has already been redeemed."

Jason Gray writes the following reflection about his song

“Everything Sad is Coming Untrue:”

The idea of everything sad coming untrue came from Tolkein’s “The Lord of the Rings” where Sam wakes after the darkest day of his life to find those he thought dead were alive and that all was well. “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” “A great shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land…”

 

 

 

The beauty of those words rang so many bells inside of me: the idea not that everything sad is untrue (which would invalidate our present sorrows) – nor that everything will come untrue someday (which reduces the hope of redemption to mere wishful thinking)- but that somehow, even right now in the face of the saddest that we see, the seeds of its undoing are sown.In fact they were sown the day the body of Jesus, like a seed himself, was laid in the ground.

 

 

What took root on Easter is the undoing of the curse, and it is flowering all around us if we have eyes to see it. Everything that’s been on my mind…. confession, redemption, renewal,- can be summed up, I think, in the thought and hope that everything sad is coming untrue.

 

 

 What I find amazing in my walk with Jesus is that when He does His work in us, it undoes the damage that came before. It redeems it all and makes it part of our redemptive story so that even our worst wounds and disappointments become things we look back on with a measure of fondness because we see that they played their part in the making of who we are today and our deliverance is sweeter because of them.The resurrection would be meaningless without the cross, springtime is most beautiful after the long death march of winter, and our wildest hopes are often given shape- at least in part- by all that seems hopeless around us.

Annie Dillard has said that God’s is a spendthrift economy where nothing is wasted.Our hope rests in this: that nothing- neither the best nor the worst that we have known – is wasted, everything can be made new, and everything sad, even now, is coming untrue.

 

The beauty of everything sad coming untrue isn’t just that God wipes the slate clean, but that somehow he rearranges the slate. Things went wrong and sadness was overwhelming- unbelievably so at times- but slowly and surely the sadness became a part of our salvation and in that way became untrue, as the power of the sadness to define our lives gave way to something more overwhelming, more unbelievable, and truer still: LOVE.

 

Easter people, raise your voices,

sounds of heaven in earth should ring.

Christ has brought us heaven’s choices;

heavenly music, let it ring.

Alleluia! Alleluia! Easter people, let us sing.