Letting the Easter Light In

 

God’s grace and love enfold and hold you.  How is the sacred, scientific experiment of exploring your life going?  What insights or ideas did you discover as you held the question, “What is it like to be you?” yesterday?  What might be breaking forth this morning as we return to this inquiry right now? 

This question gets to me in such a profound way.  I feel it right in my gut.

This is a holy question as we are all living through how to emerge from the COVID cocoon of the last year. 

For some of you, you are ready to break, burst out of that cocoon like a butterfly and take flight to somewhere, anywhere than the four walls that you have been staring at the last twelve plus months.

For others of you, there is still this twinge of uncertainty. What really is safe, even after I have my vaccine?  Why can’t the CDC send me a personalized scientist to guide me through every decision each day?  Has Apple developed an app for that yet I can put on my phone?

For still others, you are somewhere in-between ready to roam freely about or still sticking close to home.  You want to dip the tip of your toe back into the waters of life, but just don’t know if you want to dare to dive.

What is it like to be you has baked and built into that question the past, present, and future.  What is it like to be you is about what led you to this point.  You didn’t wake up this morning for the first time.  You have a past that has left the impression of the good, the bad, and ugly upon you.  You have this present moment you are trying to navigate and perhaps feel stuck like that cargo ship recently in the Suez Canal.  You have the future, what is unfolding and being unveiled in your life.  All that is present, just beneath and behind the surface of this question.

I invite you today to keep that white lab coat on, your pencils sharp and the clipboard ready.  I ask you to think about the good, the bad, and ugly of the beautifully created in God’s image known as “you” that stares back from the mirror each morning at you.  You may want to make a chart, get out a piece of paper, across the top write, the good, the bad, and ugly.  Along the side write the past, the present, and the future.  And in each box see what awakens within you.  By naming and noticing what is within us, I believe is one of the ways God gets a word in edgewise in our lives.

Prayers: God who loves both the ways we try to categorize, compartmentalize life only to discover the confusing and confounding mystery, meet us in this moment and throughout every hour today.  Amen.