Renewal

Easter. Palm branches, donkey, crown of thorns. Speckled eggs, straw baskets, chocolate bunnies. Tulips, hatching chicks, garden tools. Which version? Easter baskets and egg coloring, turning soil with a spade, the resurrection. What is Easter? In my women's group on Thursday before a two-week Easter break, ladies shared their Easter plans. Responses included "spring cleaning", vacation down the coast to So. CA and visits to theme parks, Easter egg hunts, even an elaborate clue-driven hunt through landmarks in the foothills. Easter dinners were assumed, amidst gatherings of pastel-frocked boys and girls in bows and plaids, engorged in chocolate treats, clutching furry stuffed bunnies. We'll all attend Easter services, sing hymns with raised voices and wear our Sunday bests. If Easter is ham and baskets, what is it if you have no children or family? If Easter is going to church, what will be found this bright Sunday morning? Easter's centrality, its core, is renewal. Renewal afforded by the exchange of life Christ lived for us, a plan arranged by the Father which the son humbly partook. Freedom granted through grace. Life promised through faith. Fresh, lovely, fragrant is a new life in Spring. The author of Spring is the Rock and Provider, giver of rain and nourishment for soul. Renewal is easy to see in the buds and green leaves, bulbs and grasses stretching toward the sun, the chirping from newborn beaks. Is renewal within me as real, as easily seen? Am I alive in April to pack my son's Easter basket, or to praise the living Lord who gives abundantly, fruitfully, cyclically, enduringly? Easter is renewal, is the life gifted from God. Celebration is natural for flowering trees and birds, is it so for me?

Initializing

Perhaps it is the desire to be known while remaining hidden that leads me to create this blog. I write to release, to describe, to show what cannot be seen. The clouds that cover and shadow also allow the eyes to look upward, with vision unblinded by sunlight. I can be cryptic, lucid, fanciful, ludicrous. Words forming pictures with no need of defined point, no particular audience to appease or address. I am free with my fingers as I have not been for some time. That is all for now.