So, that’s that!

So, that’s that! The Lenten sugar challenge finished up, with the glorious taste of maple (flavoured) syrup on BBQ pancakes at Hope Uniting’s Easter breakfast. After that some of the (huge) stash of chocolate that somehow infiltrated our house during Lent was shared and consumed with family in celebration of Easter joy- Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

It’s funny how just a few days later, back to work and after the fun of having family around for the long-weekend, things seem, well, they seem so normal.

Already!

And it’s only Tuesday!

I wonder if anything has changed (even our eating patterns seem to have quickly returned to their pre-Lenten form). I wonder if I have changed as I walked through Holy Week, pausing for Good Friday, praying in-between on Holy Saturday, celebrating with sunflowers on Easter Sunday? I wonder if we have changed as a community, if we’ve been marked by the certainty that the sun will rise, that Christ is risen, that God is shining light even through our fragile cracks?

It all seems so normal and yet Easter asks us to keep on expecting God to turn up in surprising places, telling us to go in an unexpected direction. God keeps on holding up and mending and making new our messy brokenness, making beautiful things from chaos. God keeps on making our mess sacred. Anne Lamott, who has written some poignant reflections on life and faith from her own experience of the mess of life, says that the message of Easter is that “awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all.” Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

The challenge of the week ahead, and the one after that, and the one after that- and on and on it goes- is living as though Easter is real, Jesus is alive, and the Spirit of God is actually, really, truly at work bringing in God’s reign all around me. Maybe every time I eat a piece of post-Lent chocolate I could think about the sweetness of that!