Why this Easter will be different

This will be my 19th Easter.  I have been through the drill--the Easter bunny visits, the sunrise services, the egg hunts, the pictures with the REAL Easter Bunny at the mall, [insert other surface Easter festivities here].

Needless to say, I know what Easter entails (not so bunny pun? [pun within a pun? stop the madness!]).  Anyway, I know what Easter looks like, sounds like, smells like.

And now I know what Easter feels like.

I have been living in Easter these past two months.  My life has been a constant resurrection and I feel more alive than I have ever felt.  I never knew that it was possible to feel so... freed, liberated, saved, other words that have to do with wanting run around and scream at the top of your lungs.  Yeah, that is how I feel!

I have been through all these Easters.  But this Easter is different.  This one is personal.  This one is special.

This is the first Easter that I have been filled with such passion and reverence about what it is that we are celebrating.  I always acknowledge the cross.  I know it is there.  I know what it symbolizes.  But I do not always fall to my knees before it.

Within the past two months or so, I have been liberated.  Liberated of a sin, or a collection of sins, rather,  that I was not completely sure were even sins much less sins that I needed to let go of.  I was pushing it to the back of my life, my mind.  But ignoring it was not conquering it.  It did not make my sins disappear.  The passing time only added to the weight of the burden until it was ready to explode out of me, until I could no longer swallow the bitter taste that had formed in my mouth from the bubbling of newly revealed shortcomings.  Guilt, ceaseless guilt.

Praise be to God, for He wrecked my heart.  He showed me that I needed to get rid of what was holding me down.

And He showed me how. 

It was quite a challenge.  And I was a mess.

It was a beautiful mess, indeed.

But now I know, that through that trial, through that exhaustion that came with trying to use my own strength to make things right, He was cleansing me.  He was breaking my chains.  And now I am feeling a way that I have never felt before, complete freedom, with a heart that literally and physically feels less heavy, one that is wide open to the love of the Savior.

Blood ran down His face.  His arms.  His legs.  His body.

That blood runs through my veins.  It gives me life!  It makes me happier than I have ever felt before!  It crushes every sin I commit before I commit it!  It washes away the wall of guilt that so traps me inside my own pool of shame.  It floods through me relentlessly, like a broken dam.  

And my walls are torn.

If I have learned ANYTHING at all that I could possibly put into words it would be that self-guilt is the devil's manipulation of the cross.  We can see the cross, we know that it is there.  But we don't see the Savior.  We don't see the broken body of the man who knew no sin, dangling in death so that we may be rising in life. We see the wood, each of the brown grains proclaiming a different sin, staring us in the face, mocking us, telling us to hang ourselves for what we have done.

But He is hanging on the cross.

I mean, we can't both fit up there.

He said "It is finished."

And so it is.

And that is why this Easter will be different.

LMB