Thursday, March 25, 2021

After Easter

--   Julie Northrip   3/15/2021          

But now is Christ risen from the dead – 1 Corinthians 15:20


Inside the Easter card was this scripture and the message “With thanks to God for you and for all the joys that are ours because Jesus lives.” I found the card last summer while looking through a box in my office. It was filled with items I had saved from my desk at the Arch when I left in 2016 but had never taken time to sort through. At first the card puzzled me. Why did I have an Easter card at work?

Opening it up, I saw it was from my sister. She wrote, “I am sorry that you have to work on Easter.” There was that one year when I was supervising the staff at the Arch and I worked on Sundays. I remember bringing her card to work with me that day. I also remember playing the Hallelujah Chorus in my office just so it would seem a little more like Easter.

My sister didn’t just send me a card because she felt sorry for me having to work. She continued with “I see Easter as not only the day that we celebrate new life through the blood of Jesus but also the new life I have because of your stem cells that make my blood. I am thankful that you were able to save my life.”

She was grateful for the gift of life, the life she had at that moment, but also for the life that she knew she would have later. Reading this a few months after her death, I will admit to feeling some guilt that my gift to her didn’t give her as many years as we had hoped. But, here in this card, written several years earlier, she is telling me that she was thankful for the life she was able to have at that moment. She was also recognizing that there would be new life for us in the future.

At Easter last year, just a couple of months after her death, I took some comfort in the message of eternal life, but it was all still a bit too raw to fully accept. It wasn’t until several months after Easter, when I found the card, that I began to think about what Jesus’s love and sacrifice meant for those of us living here on earth and in the future. It took being reminded of that special gift by someone who was experiencing a life that will never end.

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