This coming Sunday marks an eternally amazing event... The resurrection of Jesus and the forgiveness of a God who loves us more than we could ever fathom. Easter is the fulfillment of promises made to all human kind. It's when God gave us a gift that we can never repay. Easter is filled with joy and excitement and reminders of how much God truly sacrificed for us.
It's a time that would not have happened without great sorrow and loss. God lost His Son... For the time Jesus hung on the cross God was no longer able to see him, feel him, connect with him. The sins that Jesus bore for us were so thick, so heavy that it kept God from His own son. Mary, John and those who were close to Jesus stood at the bottom of his cross weeping for the man they had loved. The disciples and the others who followed Jesus were left with more questions than answers. They were left with sorrow and pain, knowing they would never see Jesus again.
But that sorrow turned to confusion then to excitement on the third day. The expectation when walking to the tomb was to find soldiers guarding the stone and for Jesus to still be dead. What they found was an angel telling them Jesus wasn't there. Not because his body was stolen but because Jesus was alive. ALIVE... No longer dead. Breathing, walking, talking... ALIVE! The lives of the people of that time were changed forever. Our lives were changed forever. The blessings and the grace and the forgiveness God gave us through Jesus were (and are) abundantly overflowing. But it took deep sorrow and pain for those blessings to happen.
I think about that a lot... How it seems that often time the most deep and life-changing blessings come out of the deepest sorrows. Sure, we see and experience blessings all the time. The fact that we wake up in the morning is a blessing in itself. But it's those blessings that shake your world and show you just how amazing God is that seem to grow from the sorrow and loss and pain. It almost feels like we can't truly know and appreciate how much God blesses us until we feel the polar opposite of blessed.
It breaks my heart to think about what God must have felt that day when Jesus died. I think about how lonely He must have felt. How would any father feel watching their son die? And to top off that loss, it was HIS choice... Because He loved us. He chose to go through that pain. He chose to suffer, and to have His son suffer for US. He could have stopped it at any point, but He loved us too much to stop it.
His loss, His sorrow turned into blessings we won't fully experience until we are in heaven. Mary's weeping turned into joy three days later. The disciples, who mourned his death, spent the rest of their lives celebrating his life and the blessings that came from his resurrection. 2000 years later people still celebrate the life he lived, the life he gave and the eternal life gifted to us through him.
It's hard to find the blessings in the midst of sorrow... It's hard to see or feel anything other than pain and grief. But, there are blessings. There were during the time of Jesus, and there certainly are today. There are blessings waiting for you (and me) to find, even when we're smack dab in the middle of the yuckiest, hardest points of our lives. Can you see them? Can you feel them?
