What Easter Means to the World

What Easter Means to the World

While I am a Christian, I do not normally use this website to try to force my beliefs on the people who read my articles, but this is an especially sad time for people all across the world. We have had natural disasters that have affected millions of people. There has been famine, war, lost jobs, and a runaway economy that will not become better next year, or perhaps not in the year to come. Many of the people I know have recently experienced personal tragedy, and that is one of the hardest things to understand. Why me? is the question all of us ask, and it is a question that is hard to answer, but let me try.

To be alive, really alive, is to know pain and anguish. Who among us would want an existence in which we felt little, or nothing, in response to human suffering? Anything worth having in life can be lost, and as a result, we suffer. Suffering is the most accurate measurement of love, for those things we love most are the hardest to turn loose of when the time comes.

As the clock moves toward Easter morning, people all around the world will stop to remember what Easter has to offer to each of us. There will be the hiding of Easter eggs and the presentations of baskets and other gifts to smiling children. None of this is bad unless it overshadows the real meaning of this holy day. Others will read slowly through the passages that tell us about that first Easter, with the sense of wonder it deserves. Many of us will leave early for a church service to hear the message, the songs, and the fellowship of friends. There is hope in all of these things, for that is the real meaning of Easter. I think Paul Wilbur has expressed the hopes of millions of us in his moving video, ‘Baruch haba b’Shem Adonai, that you can see and hear by clicking on the title to this post.

‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’