"I have seen the Lord!"                                                             John 20:18

Dear People of St. David's,

I pray that you are well and are looking forward to the celebration of Easter and the promise of the different kind of life God offers everyone - a life that is really life: filled with love, mercy, hope, and the presence of God with us.

I've been reflecting these past few weeks on what a different kind of holiday (Holy Day) Easter is from Christmas. For Christmas, many of us spend weeks and even months getting ready and listening to Christmas music seemingly everywhere we go. Most of us approach Holy Week and Easter in a very different way and with a little less certainty about how to prepare and to celebrate. For Christmas, it's lights, decoration, parties, greeting cards and gift giving, but not so at Easter. Oh, in our home we still have a modified Easter egg hunt and fill the house with a few decorations and some flowers, but it is nothing like Christmas.

Instead, Holy Week and Easter for most of us is more personal. It's more personal because we know deep down that this is all God's work and not our own. We don't deserve the love that Holy Week and Easter reveal. There's a quiet and a greater sense of awe than at Christmas. The mystery is so different than the celebration of the gift of the Christ child. Most of us understand the joy that so often comes when a child is born and how much more so when the child is destined to save us and the world from sin and death.

The events of the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday, Jesus's suffering and death on Good Friday, and the empty tomb on Easter morning feel more profound somehow, harder to understand and grasp, but ultimately beautiful and life changing. We come into the presence of a God who loves and dies for us. We come to the empty tomb and realize that the way of the world and the trajectory of our lives have been changed forever. As people who were not there, like Mary Magdalene who sees and believes on that first Easter, there is something about the story and the changed lives that spark a sense of trust and even faith that Christ has indeed risen from the dead and is here for us even now, nearly two thousand years later.

I hope that you will join with Christians all over the world and with one another this Holy Week and Easter to take some moments to ponder the depth of God's love revealed that first Holy Week. Allow the risen Christ to come into your life in a more profound way. For if we will, by pondering and walking in the way of the cross with Him, then our lives will become signs to ourselves and to others that Christ is alive and others will see and believe for themselves. We will be reborn to a life that is really life.

See you in Church!

Grace and Peace,