Happy Easter!

Yesterday was a beautiful day, and every window in the house was open. I slept with the bedroom window open last night, and was blessed with a natural alarm clock at dawn this morning.

It sounded like every bird in the world had decided to rest in the trees around my window and explode into song the minute the first ray of light burst over the hill top. A wondrous cacophony of sound, punctuated by the rhythmic honking of a flight of geese.

It was if every voice in nature joined in to sing 'He Has Risen'.

And maybe they were.

Today we celebrate the day that Jesus Christ conquered death and gave all who believe in him Eternal Life.

Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calender. The day we celebrate as when Christianity began.

There are those who don't believe, for a variety of reasons, that the events we celebrate today actually happened. I'm fine with that. Faith is a very personal thing, and my Faith in something does not make your faith in something else, or your lack of faith in anything, wrong.

A huge percentage of the world's population will celebrate the founding tenets of Christianity today. They believe that 2000 year ago, give or take a decade, God sent his only Son to Earth, to live among men, to die for humanities sins and be buried.

Do you want to talk about Faith? How about being one of the Apostles, or an early believer that Jesus was God on Earth. To watch him be betrayed, mocked, tortured and then put to death. Did any of them see that coming? Were they prepared to watch a Man they believed to be the Son of God die like, and with, common criminals?

I do know they weren't prepared to find his Tomb empty 3 days later. They weren't prepared to find him appearing to them in the coming days, and even when some of the group accepted the truth, at least one did not, until he himself was able to personally see and touch the Risen Christ.

And then Thomas believed.

Faith is not only a personal thing; it is also an exploration. None alive today has seen God, in any of his manifestations, face to face. We can't touch the nail holes in his hands, yet we believe. Others are like Thomas; they only believe in what they can see or touch.  They won't believe because they see the stories not as truth of a fantastic life, but fantastic myths, invented by men and used to entrap the gullible.

I pity them, not only for their lack of Faith in God, but also for their lack of Faith in themselves. To not believe that our life on Earth is only a preparation for a Life Eternal means that we are no better than the grass I mowed yesterday or the ants I sprayed for moving in to close to my patio. A brief existence and gone.

I have more Faith in myself than that. I not only have a life on Earth, but a Heaven waiting on me. Yes, that Faith allows me to accept that there will be bad things that will happen to me. To accept that I will not always win, that I won't live a life of ease. That doesn't mean that Faith is an opiate; a drug to keep me insensate to what is happening.

It means I know, like Job, that God has a plan, this is a part of his plan, and I don't need to understand. I just need to have Faith.

So, this Easter morning I am not only wishing you a Happy Easter, but I am hoping you have the Faith to believe that 2000 years ago the son of man walked the Earth, died for our sins and Rose from the Dead to insure that my Life is Eternal.

That is something even the birds will sing about.