I went home for Easter weekend. Home to Kansas City, where my family lives. I'm writing this in my old bedroom, where most of the stuff I've collected over the years but since forgotten about still resides. It's always a little weird coming home--such a flood of memories. Looking through old yearbooks, scrapbooks, and faded photo albums of almost forgotten family trips, birthdays and azalea festivals. So much has changed since Easter '89. Relatives have passed away, I have two college degrees, 9/11 happened, etc.
I guess I've just been thinking alot about time. How fast it goes. How I'm starting to see wrinkles on my forehead (just barely). How I only have two living grandparents left, one of whom we recently put in a nursing home. How we used to watch The Ten Commandments on TV on Easter night. How at the little Baptist church on Florence Street we sang "Up from the grave He arose!"
Oh, Easter! Oh to live in the light of resurrection, of "life after life after death" (as N.T. Wright would say). Oh to see the sun rise on a Sunday morning. Oh to trade my sorrows for gladness and see the tulips and lilies and daffodils emerge from the long hard winter.
'Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus, who defeated death, time, decay, aging... and everything else that withers and fades.