Keeping it Real – Easter Reflection 3

Share your weaknesses. Share your hard moments. Share your real side. It’ll either scare away every fake person in your life or it will inspire them to finally let go of that mirage called “perfection,” which will open the doors to the most important relationships you’ll ever be a part of.

Dan Pearce

Easter was never one of those holidays I truly understood, you know until I did. It was the kind of holiday accompanied with claymation movies, hat parades, crisp autumn mornings and crunchy leaves, songs about hat parades and of course, chocolate.

Then one year I felt the darkness. The clouds came over, my mind and my heart consumed by an inescapable and undeniable truth: I had post-natal depression and I could tell no one. I operated my life with many masks, whilst breaking on the inside.

For as long as I could.

Before it leaked into the world around me.

Drop by drop.

Each tear founded in the darkness, was where I met with Him. He held me there, my caught tears bottled in His grasp whispering, “I died for this too. This, my dear, is redeemable”. I held my breath for the mere possibility of becoming light again. The fear in failing as a human to not connect with my baby boy, He said, “That too”. He grounded my heart, and whilst we stood together amidst my heartstorm, He held me still. Firm. Tender.

There He wove in my heart a golden thread. The kind that cannot be broken. Binding up all of the splintered shards. The bruises from rejection. The pain of lost dreams. My collapsed hope, He bore it all. That’s when I knew, I understood Easter. What it really meant in Jesus going to the cross. It wasn’t just the moment of post-natal, it was all of the moments wrapped in His love.

Amongst the fragments of time, I realised it wasn’t just the sequence of my life… it was in fact… me. I am found redeemed. Whole. Healed. Beloved. All of my humanness is set free from the entanglement of my surmounting sorrow. The most debilitating of truths, is that even if I was the only one left. He’d deem me worthy of this crazy love act, again. He would hold me in the midst of my heartstorm.

Firm.

Tender.

With those eyes, pools for loving, beckoning me into His arms of grace. And I would say again and again, yes, I surrender.

It took longer than the three days Easter dawns upon, but I found hope arise in my own resurrection, when I found my life in His.

Susan