Today, I share four completely unrelated and random thoughts about Easter which are swirling around in my otherwise empty mind.

1.  It is curious to me that people who never go to church go to church on Easter Sunday.  For me, Easter is in many ways “just another Sunday,” in that every week I worship God and, every Sunday is, in part a celebration of Jesus’ resurrection.  In this way, Easter is when we singularly focus on what we think about all the time.  One of the things, therefore, to me as a Christ-follower, is that on Easter the other 51 Sundays of the year hit a crescendo.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that non-Christ-followers come to church on Easter and I enjoy being around them.  In fact, I want to make it as nice for them as possible so that they may learn the joy of joining in the rest of the year.  But coming in only on Easter would be like listening to the Rolling Stones’ concert from the parking lot or maybe just watching the trophy presentation after the Super Bowl but not watching the game.

2.  I’ve been developing in my mind an apocryphal story set sometime in the future, maybe 500 or 600 years from now about a small rural community in the Midwest celebrating Easter.  Except, in the future, all the religious iconography has been jumbled and the story is about a father and son who are the community “Guru” whose job it is to find the rabbit which will serve as the sacrificial “Easter Bunny” which is slaughtered at the “Sunrise Service.”  The final act of the pagan ceremony is to bury brightly colored eggs underneath the “Jesus Nest” which is actually the foot of giant cross located on a hill.

3.  I love cooking big meals, and so for the Greenbeans’ Easter dinner is a big meal.  We have ours on Saturday night, oddly enough, because Sundays just sap all energy out of me.  Many people enjoy ham at Easter, but we always roast lamb.  Several years ago I found the perfect recipe (link here):

The hardest part of this is finding actual tenderloin cut of lamb.  Most butchers only carry leg of lamb.  Some years I’ve had to make do with lesser cuts, fortunately the recipe still works.  This year, though, I am determined to find a tenderloin.

4.  For some reason each year I get a little cranky leading up to Easter.  It might be the added load of work—extra services, more planning, and the pressure of being “on” for the church’s big day.  But I don’t think so; I don’t think that is what it is.  I think it is that during Holy Week, my inner-most desire is to stop all the activity and just contemplate Jesus, the Cross, and my walk with him.  My inner “monk” emerges and he is grumpy because he doesn’t have that luxury.