People have asked me, seriously, how I manage.  How do I keep a smile on my face (usually, when I’m not being a whiny Eemoyore brat) and the guys happy and my attitude mostly positive and so on.

It’s because God knows what I need to have in my life.  He has given me small gifts where they are most appreciated and utterly needed.  How do I know?

A day like today is how I know.

I have been tired, as y’all know.  Tired and feeling worn out.  I’ve been “on the job” pretty much every single day without fail, sometimes for up to 20 hours a day, since mid-December.  And I was under a great deal of stress before then, too, with one thing and another.  Many of my days are marathons of endurance, balancing teaching basic things — like facial expressions and courtesy — and monitoring medications and keeping appointments and assuaging panic attacks, and so on.  Some days are just “I need five minutes. Just five.  Okay?” kinds of days.  Days where things are pretty okay…mostly normal…but there’s an edge to them.

And then, there are the gifts of days like today.

Waking up at five (totally a good time for me) and reading with Builder until the other alarms go off.  Making sure Cyclone is up and ready for school.  Making Spousal Unit’s lunch.  Getting the dishes washed and the laundry shifted. All these nice, normal times.

And then, there was peace.  Today, no teachers are coming. No therapists are scheduled.  The only to do on my list is to fill Spousal Unit’s water bottle with filtered tap water so he has it cold when he comes home. (*Note to self:   Do this as soon as this is posted.*)

Today, I put aside most of my obligations as Builder has been happily designing away on SketchUp. We have looked at office supplies, laughed at old jokes and discussed our upcoming vacation.  Peacefully, with laughter.  And he has given me space and I have given  him space and it’s been…

Lovely.  A gift.  God sends me days like this when I need them.  Today, I must have needed it.

How do I manage, someone recently asked me.  I have my escapes into fiction, certainly, and I have the grace of God Almighty, who watches over me as he watches over the sparrow.  I’m not doing a whole lot right now on a grand scheme of things, but sometimes, it must be important to the Creator of Heaven and Earth to let one tired mom have a break. He loves me enough to send me this kind of day.

Sometimes, we cry out for help and expect something big and obvious to be sent to us.  A huge influx of cash, maybe, or a dramatic shift of circumstances.  The change of heart of someone close to us.  There are a lot of things we THINK we should be given.

But our God often sends us what we NEED.  And sometimes the gift is so subtle, it goes by unrecognized.  I pray that isn’t happening to me.  I thank God for days like today.

Remember:

Tags: God, Life, love, peace

Christians adapt.  The churches of early years adapted so that the locals didn’t lose out on their parties and good times just to be a follower of Christ.  That’s why Christmas, the Christ Mass, is celebrated as Jesus’ birthday in midwinter instead of in spring (when shepherds would have been in the fields, watching their flocks by night).  It is celebrated during the time of the old festivals, like the Roman Saturnalia.  Feast! Party! But…Praise God, too!  It was, scholars say, an effort to be culturally sensitive.

For Easter, we have this day.  A day that used to be called Resurrection Sunday.  Easter is taken from the pre-Germanic word eostre (the direction from which the sun rises).  It is celebrated on the first Sunday (the day of Christ’s resurrection) after the Vernal Equinox.  (Often, this falls at about the time of Passover.)

Today, Christians also adapt culturally in many respects. Not every culture in the world has to learn the “original languages” of the Bible in order to learn about God — we try to translate God’s message for many nations and many languages.  There is no set of “righteous music” that anyone has to memorize or learn or prove expert in to be a Christian. People that have tried to impose “proper hymns” on other cultures have sometimes found them to be erroneous in culture context.

The message of Easter, though, is global.  Life after death. The love of God. The hope of eternity.  This Friday is “Good Friday.”  Did Jesus actually die on a Friday? I have heard excellent discussions that support and deny this.  He died.  When he could have saved himself, he died.  As was prophesied, his bones were pulled out of their joints. Not one bone was broken in his death, he was executed with criminals, and buried in a borrowed tomb.  All of this and more was prophesied about the coming Deliverer of Israel. And it came true.

After Jesus died, the curtain in the temple that separated the Holiest of Holies from the next chamber was ripped in half.  Not by a man, but by God, who needed no more “special access” ceremonies to gain his presence; his Son had become the bridge between Man and his Creator.

This upcoming weekend, my family is celebrating.  Not celebrating a torturous death of the only perfect man to have walked on Earth, but celebrating his victory over death. Because, on the Sunday after he was killed, Jesus appeared, alive, to many.  No, it wasn’t a mass delusion, but rather the miraculous reappearance of a man who was seen by hoardes to have been dead.  He walked, talked, ate, showed the wounds that he had suffered, and most of all, reassured his friends that he was alive and that they had to tell the world.

And they did.  All but John son of Zebedee suffered deaths that were sometimes torturous because they told others about Jesus.  For a joke, or for profit, people will perpetuate a lie. To preserve their reputation or their government. But to be tortured and die for a lie that one is telling is not in the nature of mankind.  But these people did.  And for centuries, people have believed their message of one perfect life given in sacrifice so that all of mankind can live forever with their Creator.

So if we celebrate a day that may or may not be named for a pagan goddess, if we color eggs, if we give chocolate bunnies to our children…if we do these things on a certain day, we have to make sure we share the reason we celebrate.

It’s not about the munchies, it’s about the Man.

Tags: celebrate, cultural awareness, death, Easter, holiday, Jesus, love, pagan, resurrection