In this new season of uneasiness and unknowns, finding unexpected wonderfuls continued as I worked in my front yard this week.
“When are you taking your Easter eggs down?” a hand-holding senior couple asked as they walked by our two crepe myrtle trees with their dangling pastel-colored eggs.
“We keep them up the whole Easter season. We celebrate Easter for fifty days until Pentecost,” I replied.
“Oh!” They nodded, smiled and walked on.
This safe-distance-conversation reminded me some people celebrate Easter for a day. A single day. A single event. Then life moves on.
One might call that Christ-Lite spirituality.
A new season of resurrection.
The Easter season is a big deal. If your spiritual life or church fails to bring the fact that we are resurrection people to the forefront of your consciousness during this holy Easter season, then the Alleluias I sing each day are for you. Check out my Facebook Live morning devotion, First Fruits, from my backyard Monday through Friday between 7:45 a.m. Central time.
Click to join my Facebook Live.
Our lives—especially this particular pandemic season—are so much more than what appears to the visible world. Like Easter, they have layers of depths to them and interconnections to a degree none of us realize consciously. Every season does matter. Every life matters in the Body of Christ.
I added “new appreciation for Easter season” to my list of unexpected wonderfuls along with “gratitude for neighbors who stop and talk” and “Easter egg conversations.”
I struggled with my writing earlier this month. I know I wasn’t alone in this. To be gentle with my spirit, I gave myself permission to take my foot off the peddle and coast the writing mind for a while. I relaxed.
Unexpected wonderfuls like woodpeckers and children playing along the canal and owls hooting in the night became moments to appreciate and enjoy without the back-of-mind pressure to get back to being productive. One unexpected wonderful: my unusual patience at waiting for my Heavenly Blue Morning Glories to grow. They’re almost long enough to curl around nearby posts. We’ve got a ways to wait for them, like a lot of things these days.
Deep breaths of days gone by
I’m taking plenty of deep breaths in often unsuccessful attempts to calm my nervous tummy. But I’m also taking deep breaths of a slowed-down life, like the days gone by when life was a gurgling stream and backyard picnics melted into summers like butter on hot corn-on-the-cob.
My soul, my tired spirit needed this rest—unsought, undesired—and these deep breaths and deep rests restore my soul the way the ionosphere repairs itself these days.
Let the unexpected wonderfuls in your life open your own inner healing and deep breathing. Then we can breathe some of that healing into our fragile but beautiful world.
The point is that while we are here, Mystery asks us to set aside what disrupts our humanity and belonging for the chance to see what is good and to fix the things that have been broken by hate. As we go, let’s pray into the world what we believe is possible.
Kaitlin B. Curtice from her upcoming book, Native: Identity, Belonging and Rediscovering God,
If you’re wondering where you can go online that’s safe from negative news, politics, and marketing ploys, give your soul a break by joining one of these.
1. A lovely, lovely Facebook group called Unintended Positives from shelter-in-place 2020 click here.
2. An amazing Facebook page called A View From My Window or View from My Window. Both pages feature views from people’s window around the world. A safe respite and way to sense solidarity globally as we all stare out our windows.
Read a Christian memoir (click here for mine), escape to a grand hotel in Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, or begin a devotional. I’m enjoying Terry Murphy’s A Place for Me in God’s Tent.
