Easter morning.  It just ain’t like it used to be!  It used to be getting all scrubbed up, donning my Sunday best, sitting through a standard-issue Baptist sermon, and then getting home and hunting Easter eggs.  All in all, it was fun even with a dysfunctional family!  Today I will journey four hours to visit my family for a holiday gathering, watch the current crop of kids hunt for eggs, and then eat too much.  This too will be fun!  I love watching the next crop of kids do their kid things, so delightfully full of themselves, thinking it is all about them, and noting to myself, “That is just the way it should be.”  Soon they will grow up and it will then be “all about the next crop” of kids.

The magic of the holiday is not here any more.  But the meaning of the occasion is much richer for me.  It is not longer an hysteria generated by a flame-throwing preacher.  It is the meaning of a Resurrection that has taken place in my life and does so daily if I can muster up the humility to let it happen.  If we follow the advice of Paul we will “die daily” and that then requires a Resurrection, getting up and resuming our walk, continuing to “chop wood and carry water.”