Hoppy Keester!

Easter is just around the corner!!!!  I love Easter.  I love Spring 🙂  My favorite Easter was the one when Ashole and I decided to drive to Nashville from Abilene for the weekend. 

One of many decisions that we didn't really think thru... driving 28 hours in one weekend was really dumb of us.

photoshoot outtake

I may have gone a little overboard (what?) and held a photoshoot, used a picture from our photoshoot to make matching iron on t-shirts for us to wear for the trip, and decorated my car with carpaint.**  Ash and were trying to come up with the perfect phrase to write with the carpaint… ‘Easter Bash with Sarah & Ash in Nash’ wouldn’t fit across the windows of my SUV… so Ash suggested ‘Hoppy Keester!’ for the win.  Which definitely turned into us mooning everyone we passed on the freeway.  I love us.

**I’d like to express a formal apology to my future children (under the assumption someone would ever choose to reproduce with me) for how ridiculous I can get during holidays.  It’s embarrassing.  I know.

our shirts

This year I’m totally pumped for Easter in a different kind of way.  Having grown up in a loving Christian home where I could count how many church services I’ve  missed, I’ve always known the meaning of Easter – we’re celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, duh!  and I have the first grade Sunday school art to prove it 🙂  For the past year, I have been challenged by what Jesus’ death and resurrection means and have been processing how it is relevant to our lives today… I’ll be honest, it’s a lot to process and I’ve still got a looooooong ways to go.

Early last year I attended church service at James Island Community Church in Charleston, SC.  It was a pretty typical Sunday service for me until the pastor started talking about how many people have been crucified in the history of the world – in fact, it was a pretty popular form of punishment in Jesus’ time.  So why was this crucifixion any different?  Why do billions of people take time every year to observe ‘Holy Week’ and Easter?  It’s embarrassing to admit, but I can honestly say I hadn’t ever really thought of it.  The only response I could come up with was because… well…  Jesus was the Son of God and it was sad.   Definitely true… but let’s get beyond first grade refrigerator art shall we?

While hanging on the cross, Jesus fully absorbed the entire wrath of God.

Let me preface by saying that I believe that we as humans are incapable of ever understanding God’s power and wrath here on earth.  Personally, the closest I think I come to understanding God’s power is when I watch the ocean – how waves are controlled by our moon’s orbit… and that the tides change by the hour… and that there is an entirely unexplored world in its depths… and that when the tectonic plates of the earth move, entire nations can be taken down by its force… (and people wonder why I have to live on a coast ;))   But for real… that’s just the ocean, on one planet, in one universe, part of one galaxy.  This is not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the full measure of God. 

So thinking about the magnitude of God’s power leads me to the magnitude of God’s wrath – how all of it could be absorbed into one body in the flesh.  Jesus prayed to God, “… if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me…” and the cup He was referring to is not a cup you drink out of.. it’s the ‘cup of wrath’ described in the Old Testament – the wrath of God.  The (extremely elementary) image I get when I think of Jesus enduring the wrath of God against the sin of the world is a tsunami passing through Jesus’ body until ‘it is finished.’  Powerful stuff.

I don’t know about you, but the acute understanding I have of God’s power and God’s wrath makes me realize that I don’t want to experience the wrath of God on my own… and guess what?  I don’t have to. 

Jesus left His throne in Heaven to show up on earth, to show us the way to live, to teach us about the Father, and above all to endure the wrath of God for the sins of this world; he rose from the dead and now we live in the hope that His sacrifice will bring us to Heaven.  To my non-Christian friends (that are still reading at this point!), this is what Christianity is all about and this is what you proclaim when you become a Christian.

It wasn’t until recently when I started feeling the weight of my sin and trying to bear the trials of life on my own.  It wasn’t until even more recently when I finally relieved myself of this anxiety and Jesus’ death and resurrection which is completely redefining my life.  Knowing the magnitude of Jesus’ sacrifice, knowing that my hope is not in or of this world, releasing myself from the burden of worry, guilt and pride  – I am provided with the blessing that I get to live each day with “inexpressible and glorious joy” and I will be celebrating Holy Week in a whole(y) new way – it’s not just Good Friday, it’s GREAT Friday. 

P.s. my apologies if you were offended by my Palm Sunday Facebook status: Shaking my bon bon while waving my palm palm – it was just an overflow of my inexpressible and glorious joy 🙂

HOPPY KEESTER EVERYONE!!!!  (   )(   )