Message from Pastor Karyn for Apr. 2021
“I can’t wait for Easter!”
I have heard some form of this comment from several corners of my world. This deep need for the resurrection story. It feels as if the world has been in the tomb and resurrection day is nearly here. I too feel it in myself, in my body, this need for the resurrection story. Some days it feels like my bones are jumping around, eager to be free of their confinement, or maybe that is my spirit longing for days when being free felt differently.
“God’s love has been poured into our hearts, and that love makes it possible to endure suffering, which ultimately helps us to grow stronger. ”
In a year long Lent, longing for Easter becomes a daily cry. Yet, what I am finding in this year of Lent, this year of isolation and restriction, is an invitation that I could not have heard in the time of Easter. There is something about the forced simplicity of pandemic life that bids me to slow down, to seek silence, to find hope and joy in different ways. Which, friends, is not my preferred mode of being. I am an out loud, joy full, gatherer of people, explorer of the world, learning new things, colorful kind of person. Isolation, sadness and gray days is the exact opposite of where I typically live and yet, here we are. My soul longing for Easter and yet bidding me to stay here in Lent just a little longer, because just like a tulip that needs the darkness of a winter’s earth to bloom, we need gray to help us see the color of life.
Science has been reminding us of this for eons—the light and the dark, the sadness and the joy, the heights and depths are what give life its essence. It is what makes life worth living, but if we ignore one, the other loses its power as well. The same can be said for Lent and Easter. For a time of pandemic and a time of wellness. Ignore one and the other loses its power as well.
So what to do with the weeks before an Easter that seems like it has taken too long to come? How to honor the grayness, the sadness, the hardship of this moment without jumping too quickly to brightness, the joy, the relief of the next? I’m not sure, to be honest. I have not gone through something like this before, although life hasn’t been perfectly blissful, to be sure. What I do know is that my task right now is to be attentive to what this moment is, and I am brought right back to verses from Romans 5 that I spoke to me about 3 months into the pandemic: “1Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character and character produces hope, 5and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
God’s love has been poured into our hearts, and that love makes it possible to endure suffering, which ultimately helps us to grow stronger. It is this realization that bids me to slow down in these last days of Lent, in these (hopefully) last months of the pandemic and remember not only God’s love for me, but what that love calls me to again and again, which Paul so helpfully outlines in Romans 12.
Friends, Easter is coming, that is for sure, and we will rejoice, but for now we sit and we pray and we give thanks to God for a love that knows no end.