As Easter Sunday Ends

Another Easter Sunday has nearly come and gone. If I measured my years by my Easter celebrations, it actually would serve as a fairly good description of my life.

As a child, my sister and dyed eggs and our parents woke up early to hide them in our frigid backyard. When we woke up, we found baskets filled to the brim with Easter candy and other assorted treats. Then we would bundle up, head outside and hunt for eggs. One particularly memorable year, when I was perhaps five and my sister perhaps three, my parents kept shouting to her, "Look over there! What's over there?" As my sister toddled over to the egg, I would swoop down and steal it infront of her eyes. The process repeated ten to twelve times until the eggs were all found. My mother stated it best when she said it's amazing my sister likes me as much as she does, particularly with respect to that incident.

As we grew older, we spent boring Easter Sundays at church, wearing pretty but uncomfortable dresses that were too springlike for the weather. Those mostly blend together.

In college, my freshman year Easter is the only one that stands out in my mind. The night before, I had drank too many mudslides and nearly thrown up. Sunday morning, I reached a hungover hand off my bed and picked up a piece of candy sent in an Easter care package by my church. Unfortunately as I tasted the peppermint patty, the mudslides of the night before came rushing back to me ... literally.

Law school Easters, always too close to exams, were spent eating a solitary meal of Boston Market, save for my last Easter. Postings past described the Easter on which I was dumped in Argentina.

This year, it would seem that at last I am a "grown up." I went to a 9 am church service; attended a brunch at a friend's house (where, granted, there were Bloody Marys and Mimosas galore); and then acceded to my boss' request to take photos from the shore of she and her family leaving on a cruise. The perfect balance of obligation and fun, it would seem.

The sermon this morning was thought-provoking in several respects, only one of which I will share. The minister stated that this year he pondered the difference between fact and truth. With respect to the story of Jesus' resurrection, he stated that we don't know the facts of the event, but that it's fundamental truth is undeniable, because thousands of years after his death, people still celebrate his teachings.

I don't know that I necessarily agree with the fundamental truth of the story, but his point is well-taken. We may never know the facts of events in our lives -- the how, the why, the why me?. But the fundamental truth of remains because it is what it is. For example, you don't know why someone falls out of love with you, but yet, they do, and you're left alone. The facts of how it happened may differ based upon your perspective, whether the dumper or the dumpee. But is indisputable that you are no longer together, no longer a couple, and you are alone. And that is the fundamental truth.

The point, I think, is not to worry about things we can never know. We know the truth of a situation, or of our lives, and that's the most you can know. The facts, whatever they may be, may never be discernible, and maybe they don't have to be. Things just are what they are. It doesn't matter why.