I’ve always especially liked Easter. While Christmas is a celebration of joy and excitement for the entire world to take pleasure in—even non-Christians—I feel Easter is a celebration of what Jesus did for each of us as individuals.
Easter is all about the relationship between Jesus and me. As a child, I never understood this relationship. Jesus was my friend, sure, but it didn’t really go beyond that. I guess I sort of saw Jesus as a “get out of jail free” card, someone who was there to be leaned on, but only when necessary.
It was a one-way relationship, and I didn’t really realize what I was missing until one night, when I was 14, I lay in bed listening to my MP3 player and it started playing a song I had forgotten was even on my playlist. It was a song sung from Jesus’ perspective and went like this:
“I still would have died for you,
If you were the only one
I still would have cried for you,
If you were the only one,
And rose from the dead,
If you were the only one”.
The song went on, saying that all the things that He’d gone through had been for me, and that He would do it all—He diddo it all—just for me. I remember lying in bed, thinking about the enormity of that concept. The Son of God, coming down to earth and going through unspeakable amounts of torture and reviling, giving His blood and His last breath, for me.
Although I’m not usually a very emotional person, I buried my face in my pillow and cried, because the thought of such love overwhelmed me. His heart was filled with so much love for me that it was willingly pierced for my mistakes. This man, who knew He would be rejected, despised, and alienated, saw my soul and deemed me worthy of such a sacrifice. It wasn’t a save-one-get-the-rest-free deal. He went through each and every humiliating and painful experience as an individual sacrifice for every one of us that ever lived on this earth.
This is why Easter is particularly special to me, because it shows the story of an always present, very loving God, and the length He was willing to go to have a relationship with me. I know I can never equal His love, but I will try to give Him all of mine.