Yesterday was mowing day on the Courtney estate. Started my little push mower and set out on the familiar loop around the back yard to whack dandelions and daffodils alike. It didn’t matter to me. Whatever is in my path was going down. Mowing is my therapy on bad days and it had been kind of a bad day. A friend of ours, one that we have anointed with oil, prayed over, and believed for, has received some discouraging medical news and frankly I was a little miffed at God, at cancer, and just at life in general. So I mowed.
About halfway around the third pass in our backyard I caught a glimpse of color at the base of the willow tree just inside our fence. I turned off the mower, went to investigate and found an Easter Egg left over from the Great Easter Egg hunt of two weeks ago. Jon-Mical and Jakson, for all of their enthusiasm and expertise in egg hunting had missed this brightly decorated cackleberry and here it was, waiting to be discovered by me, precisely in the middle of my mad mowing mission.
Now, I’m not surprised there was an egg to be found. Doris goes all out on the egg thing and I think we hid a million of them. And I sure wasn’t going to remember where it was. One of the nice things about getting old is that you can keep yourself entertained by hiding your own Easter Eggs. What I was surprised by was the message whispering to me in the egg. I didn’t crack it open. There was no fortune cookie kind of proverb tucked neatly inside the shell. The message was not inside the egg it was in the egg, in the fact that the egg was there, in the middle of my miff, after all of this time. The message…EASTER IS HIDDEN IN EVERY PART OF OUR LIVES.
That thought overwhelmed me like a ton of…..well, like a ton of eggs. The story of the Resurrected Christ is not just a one-day-a-year, Easter lilies and choir cantatas event. We live every moment of every day, even the bad moments, in the light of the truth that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, that He is alive and awesome on our behalf, even when the news isn’t good, things aren’t going like we expected, and the mowing is in full swing. The reminders of Easter are all over the place.
Richard Rohr says, “God comes to us disguised as life.” I rant and rave about my circumstances. I bow up in anger or bow down in fear over my disappointments. But if I look closely, if I open my eyes, God has been waiting all along in the middle of my story to remind me of Easter and the power that is His. Paul says in Ephesians 1:19-20, “His (God’s) incomparably great power for us who believe… is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.”
Listen, we don’t ever give up. We never need to lose hope. God is there loving us and lifting us when we feel like we are at the end of our rope. In fact, it is often in those very moments that we finally discover Him, hidden in the weeds of our world, waiting for us to recognize Him, like an Easter Egg on mowing day. So go mow, get miffed, that’s okay. But know that you are not abandoned or alone. The God of Easter is the God of your everyday and He is not finished with you yet.
And speaking of finished, I’ve got to get back to the yard…..