Belly Laughs

I had a soul cleansing, belly jiggling, hard to catch my breath, laughing fit with my granddaughter Harper yesterday. It’s too hard to explain what was so funny. You had to be there. But it made me realize how long it has been since I laughed like that.

Everything seems so serious lately. Heavy thoughts about growing old and the somber state of our world seem to occupy too much of my mind.

I want to be an Easter person. I want to focus more on possibility and newness and hope. I want my mantra to be what my mom and her mom used to say when things were heavy, “Just remember, nothing stays the same.”

We can find newness, possibility, and hope in any situation with God’s promises and a dose of humility.

God promises unconditional love. God promises that all things will work for good. God promises life after death. God promises to never forget us. God promises to never give up on us. We just have to believe these promises and let them take control of our thoughts and actions. That takes humility. It takes humility to surrender to and trust in God’s promises. But if we do, nothing stays the same.

We are in the season that the church calls Eastertide, forty days of celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. It’s a time that was historically celebrated by doing things like attending Easter parades, wearing easter bonnets, decorating the church with an abundance of flowers, coloring eggs, and having egg hunts.

How often do we take down the Easter décor a couple days after Easter Sunday and move on without really taking the forty days to celebrate. We focus for weeks on the solemnity of Lent but don’t take that same amount of time to revel in the meaning of the Resurrection. I think that happens because it’s so hard to wrap our brains around the magnitude of the sacrifice Jesus made so that we can have abundant life and the concept of resurrection or life after death.

It’s all ours for the asking, but that’s a tough truth to process, so we don’t. Or maybe we give it some fleeting thought on Easter but for the most part the power in resurrection eludes us and as a result, so much potential for good in our lives and in our world goes untapped.

Because it’s only when we can resurrect ourselves from chronic resentment, anger, discontent, and self-pity and find new life after the death of the old, that we can be resurrection and life for others, and start a ripple effect that can result in the peace we are looking for in our world.

As theologian Matthew Fox puts it; “Break out of your tombs; do not settle for death. Break out. Stand up. Give birth. Get out of easy pessimism and lazy cynicism. Put your heart and mind and hands to creating hope and light and resurrection.”

I want to be an Easter person. I want this Eastertide season to be a time of joyous celebration of every day possibilities and hope for the future thanks to God’s promises.

And I want to laugh until I …. well, maybe not that hard.

Will you join me?

Joan