I Am Saved

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

—John 3:17

My mom sent me the picture yesterday, God bless her. She pulled it from a folder of old photos labeled “1970–1975.” Usually pictures from that era frighten me.

Not this time.

I smiled when I saw it. Then, tears.

My mom, my dad, my little brother, and me.

Easter Sunday, either 1974 or 1975. Back when Mom sewed her own dresses and Dad sported wide ties and killer polyester pants. Matching, of course.

My memories of childhood Easters are no longer crisp and clear. They’ve faded with time, just like the photograph. But I remember a few things like it was yesterday.

Sitting at the dark-brown laminated kitchen table, the smell of vinegar burning my nose while I dipped hardboiled eggs into large coffee mugs filled with dye.

How the pink and green dye stained my fingers, and how I wiped them clean underneath the table top when my mama wasn’t looking.

Searching frantically for Easter eggs in the back yard of our Arizona home, trying to gather more than my snotty little brother did.

Posing for family pictures on the lawn after Sunday-morning church services. Dressed in our finest. Smiling. Holding hands.

As I look at the little girl in the picture, I can’t help but think of how much life has changed in the many Easters since the photo was taken. I see her small hand enveloped by her daddy’s big hand. It never occurred to her that someday he’d be gone.

Easter Sundays are no longer the same. In part because one member of our family is now absent. In part because life over the past several years has changed me.

Easter means far more than it did before. It’s no longer about egg hunts and baskets filled with candy, although we still have plenty of both. It’s not about sitting through well-produced church services or a big Sunday afternoon meal, although we certainly enjoy those with great satisfaction.

They say it is the hard things, the painful things, that shake us from the status quo such that we develop eyes to see the beauty of this one life. There, heaped in our losses, we are forced to dig deep to uncover meaning we’d before missed. Perhaps that is why Easter carries more significance than it did before.

Easter means I have a friend who understands long, lonely nights filled with questions. It’s the most sacred part of the Easter story for me. A thirty-three-year-old Jesus grieving in a dark garden of Gethsemane. Facing death with tears. He asked His friends to stay close, to help Him stay strong. He couldn’t sleep, but they couldn’t even stay awake. Oh, how I understand! For all my lonely, sleepless nights, I’m reassured I am not alone. He keeps watch with me, as only one who understands can.

Easter means I have a cosufferer who knows the agony of physical pain. I’ve experienced far more pain than I ever imagined. At times, I thought it would kill me. Other times, I hoped it would. At the same time, I see incredible suffering around the world, much of which dwarfs my own. I know this, wrestle with it. My heart can hardly bear it. Easter takes me, crawling, to the one who endured a physical suffering so heinous, so inhumane, by choice. Even more profound? He did it for you, for me, so we’d know we’re not alone.

Easter means I have a Savior who faced death so I would no longer need to fear it. It is not an easy thing to face your mortality. Forty-year-old mamas shouldn’t have to think about death. When fear creeps up, tempting me to worry about tomorrow, I remember the one who left heaven to kick death in the teeth, once and for all. Yes, death is reality. But Easter means He went first. And Easter means He beat it. And my daddy? The one holding my hand? Easter means he lives too.

Easter means I have a Father who will never leave, who will hold my hand through whatever may come. Behind every twist and turn in the Easter story, behind the long night in the garden, the horrible trial and death conviction, behind the procession along the Via Dolorosa and the climb up Golgotha to the nails and the cross sits one powerful truth: I am saved.

I don’t know what you believe. Perhaps Easter means family time, scavenger hunts, and chocolate-covered eggs. I enjoy those things too.

But after I’ve endured and overcome so many difficult days and lonely nights, Easter means something more real and urgent and beautiful than ever before.

I need more than fluffy bunnies and chocolate-dipped eggs.

I need a Savior.

One who lived and died and overcame so I could overcome too.

The day in between the death and the resurrection hurts the most. Because it is here you and I wait, fighting to believe that He will do as He promised. Do we trust Him? Do we take Him at His word? Do we bank our very breath on something—someone—many call a fairy tale?

Yes, we do. Even today while we hover in tense expectation of the story’s resolution. Because to those who believe today, life comes tomorrow.

I need Christ, not something that resembles him.

—C. S. LEWIS, A GRIEF OBSERVED