Easter People...

This past Lent/Easter season has been a deepening journey for me. I have been trying to find the best way to describe what I have experienced these past 8 weeks and "deepening" is the closest I can come to the right word.

For the first time in my life, I spent Lent in an authentic seeking posture - diligently seeking Him through a personal revival study, experiencing the "pulling off and putting on" of Lent observance and even submitting to my first complete Fast in an effort to relate on a personal level to the suffering of Christ as well as my dependence on The Word and The Spirit. All of this effort is pushing me to a new and deeper level of faith - I am diving deeper into the depths of faith, no longer treading water on the surface.

So - now that Easter has passed, and we have joyously celebrated the GOOD NEWS! - I am meditating on what that really means for me as I move past the resurrection to the purpose and mission I am called to. What exactly is the GOOD NEWS? What is the "after Easter" story? Where do I go from here????

Well, another little aspect of my Lent experience came from a book by N.T. Wright called "Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church". On one hand I believe this has been most appropriate reading during the Lenten season, but on the other hand, the message of the book has really forced me to rethink all I have been taught culturally as an American Christian - and urged me in these new depths of water that I am swimming in to view the surroundings through a new lens, to re-read the Gospel with new perspective, to question and glory in these new surroundings and to come to an understanding of true purpose. This quote from the end of Chapter 14 in this book sums up my current state of being so well I must share it as the conclusion of this post:

What we all need from time to time is for someone...to say, "It's time to wake up! You've been asleep long enough! The sun is shining and there's a wonderful day out there! Wake up and get a life!"
The message of Easter, then, is neither that God once did a spectacular miracle but then decided not to do many others nor that there is a blissful life after death to look forward to. The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it. And precisely because the resurrection was and is bodily, albeit with a transformed body, the power of Easter to transform and heal the present world must be put into effect both at the macrolevel, in applying the gospel to the major problems of the world...and to the intimate details of our daily lives. Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism. There are many parts of the world we can't do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us calls "myself." Personal holiness and global holiness belong together. Those who wake up to the one may well find themselves called to wake up to the other as well.