EASTER WAS SCARY!
By Mary Hunt Webb
Posted Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Most of my Easter memories involve going shopping for new shoes that I would wear all summer, watching Mother make new dresses, and dying Easter eggs.
[Photographer: Mary Hunt Webb (2011)]
Mother made most of our clothing on this treadle sewing machine shown above.
It is amazing that Mother accomplished as much as she did because she worked full time from my earliest memory. While she worked, I stayed with Mrs. V., a friend of hers that had children of her own. Mrs. V’s youngest child was a year older than me. Besides me, there were at least three other children for whom she provided daycare.
I must have been three and a half years old when Mrs. V and her oldest daughter took all of us downtown just before Easter.
Going to see the Easter bunny in the largest department store in our city excited the other children. However, my frame of reference for bunnies involved pictures of small animals with big ears. Therefore, I was unprepared for the large figure with tall ears that waved at us.
[Image courtesy of PhotoBucket.com]
Unlike the little girl in the photo above, I did not remain calm.
Convinced that an animal that large must be dangerous, I screamed and cried. I reasoned that anything that big could not be safe. Why was such a large creature allowed in a department store? It wasn’t even in a cage!
One of the other children in our group told me that the Easter bunny was merely a person wearing a bunny suit.
“Look at the eyes, and you can see a real person’s face inside behind the eyes!”
I looked, and I did see a face. There was a real person inside. That calmed me a bit, but since that person was not allowed to talk to the children, I remained a safe distance away.
That seems to sum up the experience that some people have had with God. Many feel that He’s too big to trust. Therefore, they maintain a safe distance from Him.
Other people read in the Old Testament of the anger that God had toward the Jews after their repeated disobedience. However, the birth of Jesus changed the way that God relates to people. By coming to earth in the form of His Son, Jesus, God showed His great love for people. That’s the heart of John 3:16 that says, “God loved the people of this world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him will have eternal life and never really die.” (Contemporary English Version)
So, you see, we don’t have to be afraid of God because He has already shown His love for us by sending Jesus to be the one time sacrifice for our sin. All we have to do is accept that love.
[Image courtesy of PhotoBucket.com]
That’s what Easter is about. It isn’t about rabbits or colored eggs. It isn’t even about getting new clothes although I have always thought that getting new clothes for Easter was a symbol of the new life that we have through Jesus. To me, it demonstrates the sense of 2 Corinthians 5:17 that says, “Anyone who belongs to Christ is a new person. The past is forgotten, and everything is new.” (Contemporary English Version) New clothes don’t make us new people, but they are a way of showing what has happened inside after we have accepted Jesus Christ into our lives.
I’m just glad that receiving new life through Christ doesn’t involve facing an oversized rabbit. Aren’t you?
