It is Easter Sunday morning as I post this blog. I’m excited that God has allowed me to celebrate yet another time the resurrection of Jesus Christ, especially since I am attending my church today with a caregiver for the first time since the Covid epidemic.
Every Easter, my memory takes me back to the summer of 1964. I was a 21 year old Air Force staff sergeant touring the Holy Land. On one of our three evenings in Jerusalem, two buddies and I searched for and found the recently excavated Garden Tomb. It had not yet become a tourist attraction, so we were able to walk right up to it and even into it even though no one was around. As I knelt in prayer at the entrance of that empty tomb, I could hear the angel announce, “He is not here. He has risen as He said”. The realization that Jesus lives covered me like a warm blanket. I have never felt closer to Jesus before or over these past sixty years since then. I am reminded of that event every time I sing these words. “Because He lives I can face tomorrow. Because He lives all fear is gone. Because I know He holds the future and life is worth the living just because He lives.”
I want to leave you with the words of another of my favorite Easter songs describing the depth of despair after Good Friday and the joyful celebration after the Resurrection. “They all walked away. There was nothing to say. They had just lost their dearest friend. All that he said, but now he was dead, so this is the way it all ends. The dreams they had dreamed were not what they seemed now that he was dead and gone. The garden, the jail, the hammer, the nail. How could a night be so long? Then came the morning! Night turned into day. The stone was rolled away. Hope rose with the dawn. Then came the morning! Shadows vanished before the sun. Death had lost and life had won for morning had come.”