An Easter Intermission

Good Friday is here, and I am alone with the kids, dying eggs. My patience is thin and thinning with every sploosh of colored water landing on the kitchen table, every crack followed by an “uh-oh.” The baby has a bowl in front of her and she is smashing her egg into a green vinegary soup. After she threatens to eat it, I hold my hands up. “Okay, okay! We’re done with the eggs. Go outside and play until they dry, then you can hide them.”
After I shoo them outside and survey the damage, I read the crayon writing on the eggs. One says, “Jesus Is Alive!”–classic Easter egg design. One says, “Foy {hearts} pancakes,” and another, “Luke STINKS.”
Not one of these precious eggs has been lovingly dyed. And within two hours, most of them will be stuck in a pokey sagebrush plant in the backyard for some neighbor dog to rescue.

It is almost too windy outside, but I lamely hide the eggs in visible sight and call the kids to come and find them. They spend the rest of the afternoon wearing out all the hiding places as if this were the most epic game ever. Their joy is perplexing. What a normal, boring thing to do, hiding and seeking boiled eggs on a windy day in my prickly backyard.

And then I see them clearly, the clues.

The hunt.

“For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

Luke 19:10

The plain, unbuffed humanity.

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

Isaiah 53

The Purpose.

God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

2 Corinthians 5:19-21

Every day and every breath is pointing us to Him, even cracked eggs that spell out the insults of a brother. The monotony of messes, the methodical cleaning up of them.  Jesus came in ordinary flesh to redeem ordinary people. He isn’t counting your sin against you–don’t you want to be found?