Easter Hope

Spring is late this year. As I write this, some snow on my front lawn has yet to melt. How depressing! Being a golfer, I view every day the snow remains in April as another wasted opportunity. Moreover, my friends in B.C. always torture me at this time of the year with e-mails that read, “Oh, we’ve been golfing for a month already.” Please, spare me.

I’m still hopeful of course. The weather forecast indicates that we could hit 16 degrees this week. Certainly, that will get rid of the rest of the snow and lawn encourage green keepers everywhere to begin doing their magic. “Just a few more weeks,” I tell myself.

Hope is a powerful thing. A wise person once told me, “There are a lot of things over-rated in this world, but hope is not one of them.”

Hope was big theme at The River’s Easter service. On Easter Sunday morning, over 400 people walked through the doors and heard a message about hope. What I love about the Easter story is that it teaches us that not only is there hope for my past (God’s grace is always bigger than our brokenness), but there is hope for my future, even if today I find myself on a rocky and rough road.

One of the cool things we did this year at our Easter service is we invited people to take a step of hope. As I reminded people, every journey begins with one step. At one point during the service, we invited people to light a candle, or to plant a seed, or to receive a pendant as a symbol of God’s grace in their lives. All of them simple, but hopeful acts. The response was tremendous. Some lit candles for others. Some lit them as a way of inviting God to light up their world. A couple that just lost their unborn baby planted a seed in anticipation of God birthing something new in their lives. I placed pendants around people’s necks with the words, “Hope is closer than you know.” I saw tears in alot of people's eyes.

As this world becomes an increasingly dark place, the message of the gospel become more relevant and shines brighter.