Easter

When I was very young, my family moved into a beautiful old house with a huge yard. Both the house and the yard needed extensive work to return them to their former glory, but the yard needed help most of all. It seemed like everything on the property was dead. There was a big dead shrub in the middle of the front yard, all the rosebushes were dead, all the fruit trees in the back yard were dead, and the pomegranate tree bore the most bitter fruit I've ever tasted. (Turns out some pomegranate bushes are meant to be ornamental. Who knew?) 

I decided that the only thing to do with this place was to cut everything down and begin again from the ground up, so I began to do just that. I grabbed my trusty bow-saw and began to wreak havoc on the yard. I cut down the shrub in the front yard, cut down a small tree in the front yard, and started on a small tree in the back yard. Eventually, my dad came around to help me cut it down, and as we began to cut, we noticed that the tree still had a surprising amount of moisture left in it, and that the wood had a faint green tinge to it. Then we realized something: these trees were not dead, they had just been neglected for so long that they were not producing leaves or fruit.

After making this realization, we dove into the project with redoubled vigor. Instead of cutting all the trees down and starting over again, we carefully nursed the trees back to health. We put in an irrigation system, we drove fertilizer spikes into the ground next to the roots, we trimmed the trees back, we cut all the weeds around the trees, and we put down mulch. Then, a few months later, all the trees we thought were dead began to bud again. Even the roses came back. We enjoyed the fruit and flowers from that yard for many years, and they were still producing even when we moved away from that house. 

I have often thought about how sad it would have been if I had simply cut down all the trees and pulled up all the rose bushes without realizing what I was doing. Yet I think that we sometimes do this to ourselves. We look at our lives and don't think that we could possibly salvage the terrible mess our lives have become. Sometimes it seems like it might be best to give up on everything we have hoped for and just start over again. However, just as my father and I realized that the trees in our yard were still alive after all, so I hope that all of us can look at our lives in our darkest moments and realize that we are not as spiritually or socially or emotionally dead as we might have thought. 

After all, it isn't just Christ's conquest over physical death that we celebrate on Easter. If He could be tortured to death and rise again from the grave, He can certainly bring us back, no matter how dead we might feel. 

Happy Easter.