Easter is time of new beginnings. More than that however, it is a time when we renew our belief in new beginnings.
In a world of harsh endings and abrupt conclusions, Easter reminds us that there is always something new on the horizon even if we can no longer see a horizon. Easter is a promise that no ending, regardless of how decisive it might appear, is ever totally an ending.
For this Easter blog, I’ve included a series of quotations that I’ve authored over the years. It is my hope that you will find something invigorating, hope-inducing, and uplifting in reading them. May they help you see a new horizon in places where you’ve lost sight of a horizon.
“I am wholly deserving of all the consequences that I will in fact never receive simply because God unashamedly stepped in front of me on the cross, unflinchingly spread His arms so as to completely shield me from the retribution that was mine to bear, and repeatedly took the blows. And I stand entirely unwounded, utterly lost in the fact that the while His body was pummeled and bloodied to death by that which was meant for me and me alone, I have not a scratch.”
“The cross unerringly exposes this stunningly marvelous and abruptly exquisite declaration that God will not let this single life of mine, with all of its grotesque maladies and pathetic filth pass into oblivion without unflinchingly declaring that my life carries a value worth the expenditure of His. And if I dare look upon the cross, I am utterly perplexed but wholly enraptured by the immensity of such a love as this.”
“In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.”
“A sunset is nothing more and nothing less than the backside of a sunrise.”
“An end is only a beginning in disguise.”
“We lose the understanding that death always begets life of some sort, and that life is always an opportunist, persistently standing ready to build something out of the smoldering ashes and raise something up out of the tangled carnage.”
“There’s something of a restorative quality about spring, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives. There’s something almost cruel about it all, as if there might be some sort of truth about a new life actually being possible. Yet, maybe it is true.”
“Life however is teeming with vitality and is likewise terribly tenacious; holding on against impossible odds in impossible situations over impossible lengths of time.”
“And because it’s all that we can see, the ending becomes an end in itself when directly ahead of us new beginnings are being forged and fresh byways are being laid out from the very ending that we’re caught up in.”
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC