The Week Before Easter

I had a plan for the week before Easter. I envisioned cheerfully dying Easter eggs, making cupcakes for neighbors, cooking together in the kitchen, taking opportunities to teach about the resurrection and spark thoughtful conversation. Besides revealing my very food-based celebratory inclinations, that list also reveals an absurd level of optimism. I have four small children. Nothing is peaceful. Nothing is smooth.

But I was going to make it work. By sheer willpower if nothing else, we would have a fun, meaningful week full of happy memories.

Only…the baby climbed on the table during the egg dying and shrieked incessantly when he was set on the floor. Someone cracked one of the boiled eggs and the three-year-old decided that it was the end of the world. Children talked over each other; even the thought of a discussion about Jesus and the resurrection vanished in the shouting about who was going to color which egg what. The eldest went out, hid the eggs and promptly forgot where she’d put half of them. I had a headache. I hadn’t slept well. I had no thoughtful, biblical words to say, and my voice was getting louder and angrier by the minute.

Then we had to hustle out the door to a doctor’s appointment and that opened a new opportunity for chaos:

Switch your shoes, they’re backwards.

What—are you not wearing underwear? Why?!

Okay, guys let’s get out of the car and stand on the sidewalk—hey! Stop that! Not that way!

No, don’t hang on that!

How did you manage to cover your entire face in peanut butter, and how did I not notice until we were out in public!??

None of this is new, by the way. It’s all very normal, everyday life with small kids. But I was so intent on doing things The Right Way and Succeeding At Easter that normal life with kids began to feel like a trap closing in on me. My shiny expectations for the week corroded into a sour attitude and then later that evening a storm of tears and hurtful words.

And into this mess walked my Savior. He didn’t say “You idiot, you should have planned better and tried harder to be patient.” He didn’t say “Oh, you meant well, so it’s not that bad that you shouted at the kids and said mean things to your husband.”

He did this: He gave me bread and wine to remember him by. The most basic things, fulfilling a most basic need. Our pastor said last Sunday that while we are generally comfortable with the idea of God being sympathetic with the ignorant sinner stuck in sin, after we’re saved, we become afraid that God is no longer sympathetic when we sin. We worry He’s just angry because we should know better. But the bread and wine plant us right back into reality. As I am hopelessly dependent on food and drink to live, I am hopelessly dependent on His sacrifice, his flesh and blood, to live. Grace isn’t some spiritual glow to make us feel better about ourselves. It’s a daily necessity for survival.

And He doesn’t look down on us for our neediness or our brokenness. The author of Hebrews writes: “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been temped as we are, yet is without sin.” (Heb 4:16) He lived with us and walked with us. He loves us right here, in the mess, with the dirt on our feet and the wrong words on our lips and the darkness in our hearts. How can we respond any other way than to “draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”?