Easter is ready, Christ has risen! Celebrate!It was a spring day, warm and fresh, and we had spent it like college kids often do, outside and relaxed. It was not the way we would spend the night. There was a loud noise about 8 pm. The sirens of the ambulance would follow. Nights we often spent in the room that he lay in, looking at monitors that never changed. Classes were difficult, when we went, but I don’t remember them. He was from Texas and we drove together back and forth at breaks. We planned to room together the next year. The young man would lay in the hospital for about a week, there was no brain activity. After 72 hours, the machines were disconnected, and after about 45 minutes the heart stopped beating, and death was official.
It was in the spring, and I can remember vivid images, though the days blur together, but one of the sharpest images are of the Easter lilies which were included in so many of the flowers. They were included just a little early, for Easter would not yet be for a few days.
Bill celebrated the resurrection early, with His Lord, and still celebrates, in the eternity prepared for the faithful. That Easter, sitting in my home congregation, there was a new awareness of the hymns so
familiar to the celebration.
He lives and grants me daily breath;
He lives, and I shall conquer death;
He lives my mansion to prepare;
He lives to bring me safely there.
It is what the Lord does, in His time, and by His power, to bring safely to himself those whom He has made his own. It is the part of Easter that helps us see the casket in a new way, the way the Lord sees it. "Come," he calls to Lazarus. "Get up," he says to the young man being carried out to burial. "Come home," he says to his children.
Easter is ready, Christ has risen! Celebrate! Pastor Allyn |
