resurrection

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A friend moved from Texas to Virginia for seminary a year ahead of me. The spring before I moved up that way, I called her to ask what it was like to live there, and what he seminary was like. After giving some rave reviews about the community and the professors, she said, "I never really understood resurrection until this year." That caught my attention. I expected her to relay some profound teaching she learned.
She went on, "When the first green sprouts poked up through the snow, and the dead looking trees put on their first green leaves, and then the cherry blossoms bloomed along the tidal basin, I got it!" That wasn't what I was expecting her to say, and I could only guess at what she meant, having grown up in the piney woods. A year later, sure enough, my first spring and Easter in Virginia revealed a new experience of resurrection as the world came back to life from beneath the blanket of snow.
That Easter was different from any I had experienced. I think each year brings some new and different level of understanding this experience we call resurrection. In the stories we tell this time of year, we remember the disciples' experience of Jesus' resurrection on that first Easter morning, but that resurrection experience is not bound by time.
If it were, the Church would just be acting out a past, dead event. The experience of resurrection we celebrate in Easter year after year is always new, eternal even. It invites us to pay attention to the world around us right now, be it the seasons of Virginia or the warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Most importantly, the celebration of Christ's resurrection should call each of us to consider what is dead in our own lives that is now being called to new life. See the new things happening all around you. Talk to your friends nearby or far away about what they notice changing in the natural world. Then turn that reflection inward to consider where the blanket of snow is melting just enough for new green growth to spring up from your soul.
Originally published in the South Jetty

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