Just Getting Started

…I am the resurrection and the life…John 11:25
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​Happy Easter!  We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song! Are you still singing three days after Easter Sunday?  I sure hope so because this joyful season lasts 50 days and takes us all the way to Pentecost Sunday…it’s not over: it’s just beginning!  If you’re wondering what that even means, this is the post for you.
This is BIGGER: Perspective is a helpful thing here.  We make a big deal out of lots of things…currently many of us are celebrating college basketball and getting all caught up in the NCAA tournament which lasts for nearly three weeks.  We host celebrations and give gadgets and awards for so many things but honestly how do any of them compare to something like Being Raised from the Dead?  That trumps everything but we can so easily skip past it in one day. For the entire Easter Season, what if you told yourself and your family “Happy It’s Still Easter” and spent a minute thinking about what Jesus did...that’s worth celebrating!
Stay In The Sunday:  God loves us with a love we as humans aren’t even capable of.  He doesn’t count mistakes, shortcomings and take plea bargains for our bad days.  He just loves in spite of it all…we get caught in Good Friday and the pain, suffering, punishment and brutality and sometimes we apply that thinking to our own life thinking we can never be “good enough” to “pay Jesus back” for all he did for us.  That’s true…we can’t!  But He’s not asking us to and he’s not asking us to stay stuck there.  He’s asking us to realize he did it for us…the dying has been done so we can move on to the living and the JOY and EXCITEMENT of Easter Sunday.  He wants us to stay in the Sunday with him, to celebrate, to rejoice, to soak up his extravagant love for 50 full days.
Fancy Stuff:  Easter calls for fancy stuff like baskets, decorations, flowers, new shoes and clothes and of course goodies.  All that is part of the celebration and it’s an event deserving of all of that, but it goes so much deeper.  The shoes and clothes will go out of style, the flowers will wilt, and the goodies will be gobbled up, but the gift of Easter is eternal.  If we spend a little time each day thinking about that, it will leave us changed.
Share it to Keep it:  Easter dinner and goodies can be shared more than just once.  What if we celebrated each of the 7 Sundays of Easter as a “mini-Easter” and took the time to sit down to Sunday dinner and invite friends or family to join you.  What if we shared Easter goodies with a different person each week of the Easter Season in order to keep the good news of Jesus’ gift alive.  What if we read and talked about the “what happened next” events that took place after Easter Sunday in order to keep the Easter joy alive in our hearts.
Our Resurrection and New Life: The 50 days of Easter is the perfect time to focus on the things we would like to “rise up” from.  Maybe we would be closer to Jesus if we rose above gossip or pride.  Maybe we would enjoy new life in our relationship with Christ if we spent a few minutes in quiet peace thanking the Lord.  Maybe our families would experience New Life if we spent more time together doing simple things like pizza picnics in a fort or playing games and going for a walk.  How can we rise up from the noise and chaos of our days…Easter is an invitation to ask the Father to help you do exactly that.
A Seed To Plant:  How will you celebrate Easter for 50 days…give it some prayer and some thought…you won’t be sad you did it!
Blessings on your day!