Resurrection Moments

Your Permission to Rest

The Carolina chickadees have been busy on the roost. Watching them has been a resurrection moment for me.

I slept in this morning, awakening to light flooding the bedroom, the dawn chorus a thing of dreams. I haven’t felt very well since Easter—nothing specific, just a general malaise and persistent achiness. It seems that burning the candle at both ends is not good for an aging body. But it’s hard to resist when the people you love most are near, when you are the host for the annual feast, when your faith tradition calls for additional spiritual practices to heighten your senses. There is leftover ham in the refrigerator and jellybeans in the candy dish and the tables still have fresh-cut tulips brightening the space. Easter came and went and now we get back to the ordinary stuff of life.

Right?

As people of faith, we are called to live as an Easter people every day but this time of year the call is formalized on the calendar—something my easily distracted heart needs to cue me to pay attention to the holy in the passing days. In some faith traditions, this week following Easter is called “Bright week,” an extended celebration of the resurrection. In Western Christianity, we call it Eastertide—a period of fifty days spanning from Easter Sunday to Pentecost Sunday. It’s a festal season, a time of joy and celebration.

So, why, since the sun went down on Resurrection Day, has my spirit been depleted? The stone has been rolled away and my heart, rather than joy, has been feeling the weight of that heavy doorstop.

To listen to this post (and Bonnie snoring):

The Easter story gives us hope, fills us with longing for that time when all things will be set right—when death will be no more and mourning and outcry have passed away. But in the meantime, we’re still here. Around us there is still death and injustice, poverty and despair. You and I are just ordinary people, after all. The power to overcome death does not rest in our hands.

We are in charge of the ordinary things—we get up, go to work, feed the family, go to the ballgame, do the laundry, sweep the porch…then we get up the next day and do it all over again. These are ordinary things. Nothing particularly compelling in the going through them. They barely warrant a mention, let alone an essay. And resurrection certainly doesn’t make the list.

It seems too small, too insignificant to say, Hey, we’re only human. Enough is enough. I am tired.

There has been this question circulating around the interwebs: What work is mine to do? It’s a way to combat this feeling that the problems in the world right now are too large for any one person to make a difference. It’s a way of moving the mountain one spadeful at a time.

There is wisdom in this. Without pacing ourselves, we are in danger of burnout, of exhaustion, of falling into hopelessness and not acting on behalf of the betterment of the world at all. But let me also say this: you are allowed to rest. You must take care of your tender heart before you can take care of others.

This is not selfishness. This is love.

Give yourself permission to focus on the small, the beauty in your ordinary life. You might be surprised at the ways the holy breaks through.

I like to call these little moments of beauty resurrection moments. Whenever we experience that stirring inside of us that beauty gives—this is a living, breathing Presence—the Spirit—right here, right now, pressing back the kingdom of darkness and ushering in the light, allowing us a glimpse of the resurrected life.

You’ve felt it too, haven’t you? When the kairos time—the holy time—breaks into your day? Holding a sleeping infant, watching the sun lift up over the ocean, standing small under a flock of birds in flight ... when we are in tune to the Spirit inside of us the place where the veil between heaven and earth becomes a thin place. A place where you can feel God as close as your own skin.

When you feel weary, give yourself permission to focus on these moments. This is how our spirits are renewed—when we recognize how the presence of Jesus breaks in our every day—how he drops bits of beauty and glimpses of the future kingdom life he has promised us. When these moments visit, pause and savor them.

And, friends? There are resurrection moments all over this place.

The dining room table, the kitchen sink, the streets of this city, the halls I walk at the hospital where I work…no tall arches or stained glass, no austere organ music or deep mahogany. Just these hands, this body, these people I weave in and out of every day.

Do I trust God enough to rest in this? I remind myself of this each day—each ordinary day: the ground I walk on is holy.

And there is nothing ordinary about that.