Realizations...

It's Easter Sunday. 

It's Easter Sunday.

Has it sunk in yet? Does it still feel like "just another Sunday"? Do you feel exhausted from all the afternoon activities? Easter egg hunting... Family Meal... Fancy Pictures... Catching up with Relatives...

Let's just be honest! Easter is more of a chore than a day of remembering the incredible sacrifice of Jesus! It almost makes me think, "Why bother?" I can have an intimate conversation with God while I sleep in, right? 

My dad didn't always go to church when I was younger. He would be what preachers call a "CEO Member" (Christmas and Easter only). I used to get so angry at him all the time telling him that he wasn't a good Christian by skipping out on church. It made me feel like he didn't have a relationship with God. As I got older it went from him choosing not to go to church to him not being able to go to church because of his job. You could just imagine my reaction! I thought it was the worst thing in the whole wide world! Not only was he not going to church, but he was working on the sabbath! I couldn't help but think that it was a sin and my father wasn't up to par on his relationship with Christ. 

After I came to college, I learned a pretty big lesson about church and my dad's way of thinking. I don't know if you know this, but my dad owns a pretty big business that helps charities such as Teen Challenge of Arkansas and the Boy Scouts. Because I never looked at the big pictures, I never realized that his church was in the middle of a parking lot setting up cones and talking to recovering drug addicts, or signing off on a boy's Eagle Scout project, even when he goes for a mountain bike ride. That is HIS church. It wasn't until I started realizing that maybe I was going to church for the wrong reason that my dad had is right all along. 

If you talk to any ordained minister they'll tell you the same thing, "You have to come to church to be with a community of believers!" That was exactly what I was telling dad all those years. Church is church and that's final. What I didn't understand was that my all time favorite hymn I would sing in church was preaching the exact opposite. 

"The church is not a building;
the church is not a steeple;
the church is not a resting place;
the church is a people.

I am the church! You are the church!
We are the church together!
All who follow Jesus,
all around the world!
Yes, we're the church together!"
- Hymn #475 

It's Easter Sunday. 

That doesn't mean that we have to dress up in fancy clothes and put on a fake smile, it means that we get to praise God for giving us all these different ways to worship! Whether it be at home, on a boat, in a hospital room, nursing home, in the middle of the woods, or in a building with your fellow believers in Christ... Just worship. 

It is indeed Easter Sunday! 

Becca