Resurrection

For this Easter, I'd like to share a piece I wrote last spring. I performed it last year at my high school during its annual event called Creative Expressions Night. I paired this piece with the poem Staying Power, by Jeanne Murray Walker. (It's a beautiful poem. Read it here, if you'd like.)

Anyways, here it is.

Resurrection

I didn’t feel ready for Easter this year.

Maybe it was because I didn’t go on the appropriate emotional journey that was expected of me – that I expected of myself. It starts with the mourning on Good Friday, a sober contemplation on the brutal crucifixion, and the magnitude of my sin hitting me in the gut. I dwell on the nails, the pain, and the God-man forsaken. Then there’s Saturday, a sort of numb ache, my waiting for the hope tomorrow will bring. And then – oh glorious day – Sunday comes, and a vivid taste of victory, joy, and confidence lands on me. I savor the power of the cross and listen to the crack of the curtain tearing in the temple. I relive this journey, a pilgrimage back to the time when I was carried out of the pit and brought into sunlight. When God raised my dead bones to life.  

I think I didn’t feel ready because that didn’t happen this year. My lack of emotional attachment made me uncomfortable. I was feeling dirty, at midnight after Good Friday ended, when I realized I hadn’t even thought of Jesus all day long. I sat down on the couch to play guitar, a lost feeling in the pit of my stomach, hoping that the music would bring me back to what I thought was the right place. It didn’t, and my voice was hollow as I sang the words I couldn’t feel: this is all my hope and peace, nothing but the blood of Jesus. All I managed to do as I started to fall asleep was muster a prayer for God to move me to a better place. It was my small whisper of a hosanna, my hope for Jesus to enter me like he entered Jerusalem.

This feeling of brokenness, and the recognition that I am trying to earn my way to God, and even seeing how I believe feeling  a certain way is more important than knowing God – it’s all too familiar. My inward struggle, the war that the Spirit of God requires of me, sometimes feels like enough to discourage me from entering the empty tomb – where, even though I can’t believe it at first, I will find life again. 

God is the phone call I didn’t want to pick up. He’s the one I doubt even if he never disappoints. Sometimes I think I need Easter every day.  

Because really, Easter is simply the finding of God. It’s when dawn breaks upon the dark tomb of my heart. It’s when God lets me see his glory in the craziest things – blood, death, betrayal, and a naked tomb with a missing body. In the holes in your hands, Jesus, the scar on your side, and the look in your eyes. You free me from shame, and I want to have unfettered obedience to you. More than a faith grounded solely on feeling, or just on knowledge. Shape me like metal in fire, brand me until all of me, every part, my soul, is yours. I’m going to search for you with all my heart, because to believe you’re alive is the resurrection of my faith.