"A king dreaming of sunshine...and a wolf."

HAPPY EASTER! CHRIST RISEN!

And my heart and my life are bursting with happiness!

Today was so beautiful, even though it started at the incredibly early hour of 6:00 a.m. We went to a sunrise service on the beach, and stood, shivering and singing in the cold morning light, with our feet making gentle impressions on the soggy sand. In the Eastern sky, glorious oranges and pinks flamed with beauty, and in the Western sky the tissue paper moon clung stubbornly to the day. "Sing ye heavens, and earth reply..." And it was not hard to imagine the sun, and the gray sheet of ocean, the sea gulls, and the moon all celebrating the joy of resurrection.

Creation knew about Resurrection long before Jesus ever actually died on the Cross and rose from the dead. C.S. Lewis said that the very lengthening of the days during Spring--the returning of light--and the blossoming of all the flowers and trees that died during winter--foreshadow and affirm the Resurrection.

So I stood there, hardly able to conceive of the goodness and the wonder and the beauty of living in a world where the Resurrection is a reality. Not a fairy tale, but the essential truth...the foundation upon which all things exist.

The Bible says that man's days are like grass, that we are dust. We flourish like a flower of the field, the winds blows over us, and we are gone, and our place remembers us no more. And yet, as I've wandered these New England woods and towns the past few days, I am convinced that even the short life of these flowers does not take away from their beauty. They are beautiful in their time. And man is not simply made of dust, but of the Breath of God.

In church, sitting on the worn wooden pews and trying not to fall asleep, I was filled with the warm realization that Christmas and Easter make my life bearable, worth living, actually valuable, and wonderful...As long as Christmas and Easter endure, as long as their Truth remains among us, we will have hope.

After church, we came home and I took a luxuriously long Easter nap, and then Megan's friend Amy picked us up and took us to Lynn, where Gordon has a dorm in the city. Angela, her sister Heather, Anna, Andrew, Amy, Megan, and I shared a lunch of pasta, salad, garlic bread and brownies, and played Bible trivia games, Cheats, and telephone pictionary (hence, the title of this blog). Telephone pictionary sent me through roof with laughter, and settled me into a joyously happy mood that I've had the rest of the day, because I laughed until the tears were running down my face, and I just couldn't laugh enough.

Megan and I got back to Gordon around dusk, and went for a walk in the woods to Gull Pond, talking about life and God and listening to the tree frogs and throwing rocks into the water. When night finally settled we sat on the dock at Coy Pond and I told her stories about the preschoolers in my Sunday School Class at Blessed Sacrament.

We ended this most lovely day snacking on salt and vinegar chips and looking at pictures on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com --a site I most highly recommend. (I also retook the Harry Potter house quiz, and am still decidedly Hufflepuff.)

Tomorrow we're going to Boston!

"Jesus came up from the ground so dirty,
with worms in his hair and a hand so sturdy,
to call us his magic, we call him worthy..."