Eastertide: Not in Vain
1 Corinthians 13:8 NRSV
“Love never ends.”
There is a photograph.
Four girls in Easter dresses. Three little ones and an older sister. Bonnets. White gloves. Small purses. Careful posture. They are cute.
That is what I saw when Rosanne first shared it with me in 2006.
Recently I looked again. And this time I saw her face.
It is the face I knew through most of the days we had together. Not presented. Not performed. Simply there. The face of a young teenager—she is perhaps thirteen—and it is already, unmistakably, the face I loved.
That broke me. Because she is gone.
Easter does not give her back to me.
But then I looked a third time.
And I saw something else. Not grief. Not even love, exactly. I saw intent.
The baby in her lap. The sisters around her. Her parents beyond the frame.
The question she is already answering without being asked:
How shall I care for them.
Not how. Simply that she will. And nothing will deflect her.
That is who she was. I have written three books trying to say it. And here it is in the face of a thirteen year old girl in an Easter dress.
Love never ends.
Not because I can prove it.
Because I have seen what love looks like
when it has fully decided what it is for.
Prayer
God, when I cannot resolve what I have lost, keep me from believing that what was given in love has been lost with it.
What Cannot End Us
Mark 16:17–18 NRSV
“And these signs will accompany those who believe…”
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These words are difficult. Very difficult.
They were spoken on Sunday and I found myself wishing I had not heard them.
They sound like promises of protection.
As if belief could shield the body from harm.
As if faith could prevent what we know, from experience, is not prevented.
I have lived too much to hear them that way.
Bodies fail.
Suffering comes.
Prayer does not always turn it aside.
I cannot wish them away.
So what are we to do with words like these?
Perhaps they are not describing a life without harm.
Perhaps they are trying—imperfectly—to speak about a life
in which harm is no longer the final authority.
They will pick up serpents.
They will drink what should destroy them.
They will lay hands on the sick.
It reads like invulnerability.
But it may be something else.
It may be the language of people who have come to believe
that even what wounds them
cannot end what has begun.
Not because suffering disappears.
Because the meaning of suffering has changed.
The cross remains.
The wounds remain.
The body still bears them.
And still—he stands.
If these words promise anything, it is not that we will be spared.
It is that what we endure
does not have the last word.
I cannot say this easily.
I have stood where this was tested.
But I cannot say that suffering is all that remains.
Something resists that conclusion.
Not enough to explain.
Not enough to prove.
Enough that I cannot call it final.
Perhaps that is what these words are reaching for.
Not protection.
But persistence.
Not safety.
I know one thing:
A life cannot be closed by what would destroy it.
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Prayer
God, when suffering speaks as if it is final, teach me to live as though it is not.
The World Is Too Much
John 20:26 NRSV
“Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them…”
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The world is too much.
Not only in its weight, though it is heavy.
In its insistence. Its density. Its claim to be all that there is.
What can be seen, measured, named—this is what we learn to trust.
This is what presses in on us.
This is what fills the room.
And so we live inside it.
Easter does not remove us from the world.
It does something more unsettling.
It asks whether what we have taken to be the whole of reality
is, in fact, only what we can perceive.
He stood among them.
The doors were locked.
Nothing had changed that could be pointed to.
The room remained what it was.
And still, he was there.
Not outside the world.
Not beyond it.
Within it—without being contained by it.
They did not recognize him immediately.
Not because he was absent.
Because what they were looking at
was still being interpreted by a world that had not yet made room
for what had happened.
I know that condition.
It is not that presence is nowhere to be found.
It is that the world, as I have learned to perceive it,
leaves little space for anything that does not behave
as presence used to behave.
I do not fail to perceive because nothing is there.
I fail because too much else is.
Too much that insists on finality.
Too much that closes the case.
Too much that declares what can and cannot remain.
And yet—
I cannot say that absence is complete.
Something resists that conclusion.
Not consistently. Not in a way I can prove.
But enough that I cannot live as though what is gone
is all that is real.
To live inside resurrection is not to see clearly.
It is to discover that what I see
is no longer the measure of what is.
The world is too much.
And still, it is not all there is.
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Prayer
God, loosen the hold of what I can see, so that I may not miss what is already present.
On a whim... 