Easter, is that you?

Easter is this Sunday, and it came so fast. But it isn't like any Easter we have ever known. We are going to be at home, with our families instead of in the Church. We are going to be having backyard egg hunts instead of egg hunts with everyone in our Church backyard. Everything has changed in such a short amount of time and the time to celebrate one of our most important holidays has come. Holidays in quarantine. I never thought that'd be a sentence I'd say. Yet here we are, having an Easter unlike any other.

Let's think about something. If you knew that you could never leave your house ever again, what would you do? Who would you want there with you? Who would you depend on? Feel free to leave comments down below. I hope that you would want to have friends and loved ones there, yet I also hope that you would depend on God. Guess what guys? We can't leave our houses (unless absolutely essential). We need to depend on God now more than ever before. When things are disappointing, strange, scary or downright different, we must depend on God.

When we hear about stories in the Bible, we hear many stories of normal people having to depend on God when they're entire circumstances changed just like that. I'm going to share a few examples from the Bible. The first is when Moses went to Pharoah and asked him to free his people. It took some persuasion (and a few miracles from God), but he eventually agreed. He let them go. Suddenly the Israelites found their lives completely different. They had been slaves in Egypt for many years and they ultimately depended on the Pharoah to supply them with their needs, even if it was done harshly. The Pharoah kept them in captivity and yet he was their whole world, apart from the hope they had that God would one day deliver them to the promised land as he said. Soon the Israelites found themselves packing up and leaving their homes, their whole lives behind. They were finally escaping from captivity. Yet the Pharoah wasn't quite ready to let them go and decided to come after them. Naturally, the people panicked, and they made the mistake of questioning Moses and even God. Moses told them to watch and God would rescue them. And he did. He saved them again.

Exodus 14:14 really resonates with me. "The Lord himself will fight for you. Just stay calm." This can apply in any situation from a fight with your best friend, to a fight against cancer, to this Covid-19 situation that is happening right now. We can be calm and know that the Lord fights for us, through any situation. After the Lord rescued the Israelites, he led them into the desert. Here is where I think the Israelites really messed up. God changed their entire world and led them into the desert and I think he did so to give them an opportunity to place their entire lives into his hand. He gave them an opportunity to fully depend on him. And I think that God is calling us as Christians to use this opportunity to fully depend on him. Our entire lives have changed and God has led us into the "desert" where there is a lack of friends, of school, and even a lack of toilet paper. Let's put our lives into his hands, the Lord who controls everything, when we can control none of these things.

Let's talk about one more Bible story before I wrap up. We all know it well, in fact, it is the entire reason we celebrate Easter in the first place. Imagine that you are a young person, just starting your life out. Apprenticing as a fisherman or as a carpenter when a young man approaches you and asks you to abandon your entire life and follow him. He's not unlike yourself, he is young and appears to have had a similar upbringing as you. He lives around here, in fact, you may have even heard of him. His name is Jesus. So you decide to give up your entire life. You decide to put your faith in him because something about him is just, well different. He promises you things you've only dreamed about. He promises you eternal life and he teaches you how to live a way that is pleasing to God. So you follow him, watch him preach and teach to crowds about the kingdom of God. You spend your entire lives with him. You wake up with him, you go to sleep with him, you eat with him, you travel with him. But there are whispers. Whispers that he is the Messiah, and you start to realize the leaders here don't like that. They don't like this Jesus person and they would do anything to get rid of him and his teachings that undermine all this power they've grabbed for themselves. So they come for him in the middle of the night, as if he is some common criminal. They take him away and you realize that one of you is responsible for it. You watch as the man you follow is tried, beaten, tried again, and convicted to death on a cross. You are devastated. You know that he is innocent and has done absolutely nothing to deserve this death, the death reserved for the worst of the worst criminals. You watch as he carries his cross up the hill and you watch with horror as he is nailed to the cross and hoisted up. And eventually, he dies. As soon as he does, a strange darkness comes across the land and an earthquake shakes the whole earth. You watch in horror. Your leader, your friend is dead.

They take him to a tomb and lay him there, but because of your customs and the Sabbath, you are not able to prepare his body as it should be. So you go home. Alone. You toss and turn in your bed. Everything has changed. Your entire life has changed again. It's like what you did for so many years was pointless, the man you put your entire life and trust in is dead. He is gone. What to do? Maybe you decide to go back to your old life, of fishing or being a carpenter. Imagine it. A Sunday not unlike the Sunday we will have this week. Everything is different. Our entire nation is changing all around us. We have lost so much. Just as the disciples lost so much. Can you imagine waking up on Sunday morning, hoping that it was all just a bad dream, and being suddenly brought back to reality; quite painfully. Jesus is dead. You go about your morning in a daze because he is gone. But how little faith you actually had. For that very same day, he raises from the dead, and in doing so sets into motion a plan that has affected every single person from then until now. What he did spans across centuries, across families, and across the world. Jesus died for us and rose from the dead. He gave up his entire life. Think about it. Not only did the disciples' entire life change, but Jesus' entire life changed too. And he knew it was coming. Yet he still chose to put his faith in God, and depend on him with his entire existence.

I pray that you will take this to heart. I feel that God is calling us to depend on him more. I miss you guys. More than you could ever know. I love you all. More than you could ever know. And so does God. He has not left us, rather he is waiting in the wings for us to come running to him. For us to put our entire lives into our hands in this time that is so, so different than anything we have ever known. Thanks for reading. and remember the verse I mentioned earlier, Exodus 14:14 "The Lord himself will fight for you. Just stay calm." Let us stay calm and LET the Lord fight for us. I am here if any of you need to talk or want to pray. Please don't hesitate to reach out.