Five Good Reasons Easter Is My Least Favorite

5) I am all done buying my kids shit. OVER. IT. Christmas, Valentine's Day, and now EASTER?? They're gonna start expecting presents for Every. Stinkin. Day. Off. School. Parent Teacher Conference day? Martin Luther King Day? Guess what, little humans? It's not ABOUT you. Jesus's birth. Jesus's death. Jesus's resurrection. Teachers meeting with parents during work hours. Martin Luther King leading a civil rights revolution. Nope. Not. About. You.

4) I don't know how to hard boil eggs. I look online every year. Last year, with newfangled Amazon assistance, I asked Alexa. Apparently, I cannot seem to manage this basic thing; Scott takes over every time. He barely manages grilled cheese sandwiches and yet he kills hard boiled eggs.

The following is a separate thing, but it feels right to include it in #4: I have no idea how to dye eggs with four young-ish kids. I know elementary school art teachers live and dye (intended) by the rule "don't mix colors. keep your colors separate!" but how does that apply with the double dye dipping scenario? Best yet, how do you place 4 different-colored cups of magic in front of a three-year-old and then expect her to hold a dense object on a toothpick-wide piece of metal for three agonizing minutes to get results when she can barely SIT IN A CHAIR for three minutes?

3) I don't know how to say this without sounding like a creep. But I hate the Easter Bunny.

I just do.

Santa in the mall somehow sets well with me. He represents generosity. You can see his eyes. You know its gender. He is a human being. Red and white are respectable colors.

The Easter Bunny is a whole different beast. There's NO indication of what is behind those mesh eye holes... boy? Girl? Maniac? Not-employable video-gaming-basement-dweller? And the PASTELS... Life-sized bunny rabbit sits on a throne of baby pinks and baby yellows and baby blues. LIKE. THOSE. ARE. REAL. COLORS. The only time those colors ever make it to paint are for nurseries. And there are fully formed non-baby children lining up to see this plush guy/gal mascot surrounded by pastels that aren't even represented in nature's true Spring. Find me a pastel yellow dandelion, would ya? But wait... here's the clincher: I love Santa, because in addition to all things lovable about the jolly dude, he is a modern-day representation of flesh-and-blood St. Nicholas, who lived and breathed, and gave, and witnessed his care for little ones during his time on this earth. Mall Easter Bunny descended from NoBunny.

In short, I just don't dig the dang bunny.

2) I'm gonna get real with y'all on this one. The story of Easter is just intensely difficult to experience or honor with any degree of justice.

You probably thought I meant in our relaying it to our kids.

But I actually meant MYSELF.

I try. I make it to Mandy Thursday services. And Good Friday services. And then, of course, to Easter services. And the heaviness of Jesus's crucifixion is a strong cornerstone to the story of our Chris's full-picture grace to humankind. I mean. I think I get it. And I know I'm supposed to hang tight until Sunday, because that's what makes the story complete and "you can't have a resurrection unless you have a crucifixion" but dang if I don't always feel that this reasoning resonates with me.

But, crucifixion/resurrection talk aside, one of my issues is that I feel like Easter should capture so much meaning in my faith life but often I just can’t seem to conjure it up. Additionally, I think I get pissy about Easter morning's show woman ship (cuz - let's just be real - the outfit ensembles are the work of mostly women in the family). The day is emotion-laden if taken seriously. Mysterious, Awe-filled. Surprising. Weird. Scary. Hard-to-Believe. And yes, these many years later, Celebratory. Life over death. Light over Darkness. Right over Wrong. Good over Evil. Things of the Sprit over Things of The World. This, for me, is in many ways the crux of my faith, so I ought to be cheerleading my way to church on Sunday morning.

But instead I feel a little like we are all mainly excited to get a really good picture.

I know!!! I'm so darn cynical. But #2 is #2 and I'm being honest and it's actually a real problem for me, so go easy. And, please be in touch to offer your help, if you have any.

Oh, and also part of #2, I have no idea how to frame the Easter story for my kids. I'm too busy dealing with ME.

1) The plastic eggs and the green straw. Every year I save them. Every year I tell myself that, since I've done such a kick-butt job conserving the batch from that particular year  and since I have an impeccably labeled tote storage system in my basement, I will save myself the trip to the Dollar Tree the following year. But every year I cannot bare to open the tote containing passed-down batch of mismatched  plastic eggs and hand-me-down jelly-bean-stickified straw that has been restlessly awaiting its debut. I would rather pay $3.85 for a fresh batch. This means that I now have thirty eight totes I never open in my basement.

But at least they are tidily labeled "EASTER - DON'T OPEN!"

I found an outfit I never wanna take off

It was in 2007 that I took off my cross necklace for awhile. At that point, I had been feeling unsettled about my status as a Christian off and on for a solid few years and had committed some serious energy to discerning whether I was one any longer.

It felt weird to go through this, let me tell you. "Christian" was like fifth on my list of identifiers as a person. Woman. Mother. Wife. Runner. Christian.

It also felt weird to have been raised happily in the church  (Sunday Schooled, Baptized, Church Camped, Youth Grouped), to have gone to church by choice all through college, to have worked in a church out of college, to have become all grown up and join as tithing members with my husband to a church congregation and to yet nonetheless wrestle so.

I was not wrestling with God (loved Her!). I was not wrestling with Jesus (loved Him!). I was not wrestling with life (loved It!). I was not wrestling with church (loved Church people!). You see, I hadn't been burnt by any of the distinct entities that made up my faith life. I was simply wrestling with the broad definition of "Christianity."

My goals during this process were two-fold: #1) To determine the definition of "Christian." #2) To determine if I was one. My thinking was that if I couldn't faithfully believe/follow/make sense of  50% or more of my findings from #1), then I probably wasn't one. And, yes, I am aware that 50% is failing, so I was being generous.

It took about six months to determine the outcome.

I flunked.

I decided I had been wearing the Christian costume long past it fitting properly. And taking it off without an alternate costume meant I was religiously naked. Didn't even have the jewelry of my cross necklace. Damn. Naked.

But then, about a year and a million books and conversations later, something fantastic happened.

I realized that I was both terribly wrong and pinpointedly right. I was right that the old Christian costume was indeed too small, too itchy, and too clostriphobic. I was wrong that that meant I needed to let go of Christianity altogether.

There was a whole new costume, a Christian one too, awaiting me. Who knew! This new one is all roomy and down-filled and allows for all my appendages to bend and stretch every which way. Best of all, it grows with me. I won't need to swap it out for another ever again!

Step One: Put cross back on. (Then silently beg for passers-by to ask about my new costume, cuz this beauty of a cross means something quite different than it did to me a year ago)

Step Two: Spend some serious time breathing in this new identity as a Christian. This meant keeping a serious spiritual eye out for old trappings and keeping my personal communication with God consistent, frequent, and pure. Yes, and also giving myself time... it takes time for the full adoption of a new way of looking at things.

Step Three: Be relentlessly choosy about our church home (Which, as timing and relocating would happen, was poignant)

This is exactly what I did. And now, so many years later, I'm still growing into my costume. While my jewelry and church home choices  are secure, I work on Step Two ongoingly. And, truth be told, I also still silently beg strangers to ask me about my faith. I keep thinking that if folks knew what I have found to be true of God and of Christianity 2.0 since my 2007 crisis of faith, they'd be lining up to get charms, tattoos, pendants, and hair cuts in the shape of a cross. Or a heart, maybe. Or a peace-sign. All three would work great, too.

So, I'll save the lists of my definitions (both old one and new one) for a different post. I'm sure you'll be holding your breath, so as a teaser, here is a teensy description of the identity of my new costume: It is one that sort of giggles at definitions and prefers poems and parables and paradoxes to legal documents. It's one that nudges me closer and closer to the behaviors of Jesus, which is to say a pure and real love for people, especially the ones who the world deems furthest from the bull's eye. It takes you as you are, questions and doubts and worries and fear-filled and prideful and imperfect and all. And it privately snickers at those taking themselves too seriously. And it grieves when it sees fake preside over real. And it wants all of you. All of you. And all of me. And I'd want it no other way.

Cling Loosely

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

And yet...

"Which of you, if you had one hundred sheep, and lost one of them, wouldn't leave the ninety nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that was lost, until he found it?"

Life is a funny little thing, isn't it?

I find myself uncertain sometimes of how hard to cling to it. This, coming from a woman who happily weeps when holding a newborn infant and commits to bleary-eyed sobbing at the news of funerals of strangers.

I went through a phase in my young adulthood years, where I often internally acknowledged, "I could die today. And that'd be ok."

I wasn't depressed, mind you. And not obsessed with death, though it sounds it, in the least. Quite the opposite. More: obsessed with living. Fully recognizing that it [life] is not guaranteed to last and fully accepting that living it to the best of my ability was what made that knowledge ok.

And then, during a recent gathering of women who dedicated some discussion time to what our role ought to be following the Parkland shooting, one participant brought an unexpected thing to light. The conversation had been caught up in a whirlwind of emotion, some of us sad, some of us mad, all of us distraught. And this one friend, who happens to be an ICU doc, said, "I think it is important to remember that people die every day. Hundreds. Thousands. Many not in as sexy a way as a school shooting..." I forget exactly how it went from there. I'm pretty sure we weren't buying it... so zero-focused on the current event and its awfulness, the whole school kids thing and the unnecessary senselessness thing making loss of life feel so much worse.

She wasn't downplaying awfulness; she was leveling the playing field of human life and, inter-connectedly, death.

When the towers came down, I remember shortly afterward finding myself in a church van on a road trip returning from leading a church event with two of my 40ish-year-old youth pastors. At the time, I was newly out of college and serving a church as the youth intern, so lost about how to frame the event for the teenagers in my sphere of influence, must less for myself. We stumbled upon the subject in the darkness of those interstate miles and this is what my youth pastor said: "This is how it goes. The facade that peace is guaranteed is nothing more than that: a facade. No nation is exempt from unexpected horrors and history is evidence of that. Loss of life is loss of life. Is it necessary to fabricate spiritual implications?" My. Youth. Pastor. Said. That. I remember being both heavily disturbed and oddly comforted by what seemed like a dismissal... a "What's the big deal? Move on!" response to one of the most devastating losses of collective lives in our country's history and THE most hard hitting events in my own lil ole life.

And then there was the death of our dear Duncan. After four and half months of many joyful and happy moments but mostly while weak and fragile, our little guy suffered two cardiac arrests in the hospital in a short time and was responded to quickly enough by a roomful of docs and nurses and meds each time to be brought back. In the hours that followed, Duncan was not in good shape, and Scott and I spent most of them prayerfully discerning: we felt that God were asking us to let Duncan decide...that we ought not take additional measures were his heart to stop again.

His heart did stop again. And we let it.

For us, loving him best meant not clinging to his life.

I think sometimes it is hard to approach the paradox of life...

One guaranteed to be individually valuable enough to be pursued, followed, sought after by the Divine, even when there are 99 identical bleating back-ups on deck

yet

One also summed up by the word "dust"... part of something, yes, and only separate from the bigger whole for this short time, insignificant compared to the rest.

We are taught to believe deeply that this life matters. And it does. It matters so much that becoming lost while in it will send a search-and-rescue team. How do we live it like it matters that much while keeping loose our grip upon it, resisting the tempting notion that we must fight to keep it?

I don't guess I really know.

But discussion group gal and youth pastor and Duncan all have taught me about perspective. And I think that's the best place to start... When I discover myself gripping, it's usually when I've zoomed in too small. When I zoom out big, I find myself most at peace and in connection with the Divine and ungrippy. It's then that I tend to remember what Perspective has to teach me : God's got this. Always has. Always will. This life isn't all there is. Mine is a life that is part of something bigger.

I'm both a speck of dust and a damn-important sheep.

And this makes me cling loosely.