Easter

Twenty three Easters I lived just going through the motions. Twenty three Easters that were the culmination of 40 days of Lent where I would sometimes give something up but usually give up giving something up by the second week. We would have to go around the classroom and each say what we gave up and I remember the one kid who gave up hot showers and his bed. And I thought that he was probably crazy.

Anyway. There were Easter baskets and trips to the mall to visit the Easter bunny. I remember a scavenger hunt that ended in the movie Babe and a new Polly Pocket toy. I'd don a new dress and some uncomfortable shoes and Easter would come and go just like any other Sunday, just like any other holiday.

But then I turned 24 and a few months later I was pregnant. I didn't even understand the love I would have or even could have for the tiny life that my body carried until the moment I saw him for the first time. He was born five days before Easter and I was slightly obsessed with having an Easter baby and so Easter was one of my first thoughts as I laid eyes on my beautiful baby boy. I was so overcome with the love that only a parent can have for their child that I understood the slightest, smallest fraction of the love that my Savior has for me.

Sometimes I think about how God has this incredible capacity to love every single human that ever was or is or ever will be. And I am so overcome with awe and a complete inability to even understand it. How in the world can he love every human the way that I love Maddox? How is it possible to love anyone more than that? Because I'm telling you, I don't know how I could love another human as much as I love Maddox. I know that I will have other children and I will love them just as I love him, but I cannot wrap my mind around that. But God does. He unconditionally loves me and you and everyone in this world including the people who don't use their blinkers or who cut me off and then proceed to go five miles under the speed limit. He loves the worst criminals and the goody-goodies and the people who don't love him back.

If that isn't true love, then I don't know what is.

I could sit down and write out every single sin I've ever committed. I could write down the little ones and the big ones and the ones I just can't quit (I'm looking at you, name calling in traffic). I could write them all down and I think I would run out of time before I'd run out of sins. It would take me the rest of my life to get them all down and I would fill page after page with my sins. And then I would finish and I would put that notebook away and I would walk out the door and I would gossip and I would think mean thoughts about the parents who are smoking in front of their children and I would be a bad role model for Maddox in, like, every situation even though I'm trying really hard to be better at that. And I would fight with Evan and be annoyed with my parents and I would skip church to sleep in and I would be a glutton and I would lust after Jesse Pinkman and Jackson Avery and I would be two faced and mean and rude and a horrible, horrible person and if anyone ever saw the things I would write down in my Record-of-Sin Journals, no one would ever want to be my friend.

So sometimes I just think about how I commit all these atrocious sins and I am no better than any other person on this planet, no matter what they've done or will do. And my Jesus loves me anyway. He loves me despite my flaws and shortcomings and He loves me through them and He'll love me tomorrow after I've done it all over again. He not only reads this journal but he sees me live my life and think my thoughts and has not abandoned me.

That's immeasurable and beautiful and something I didn't come close to comprehending until I became a mom. I still fail at understanding it because my humanness gets in the way but my grasp of this unconditional love that covers all sins, all shortcomings, that thinks that I am beautiful despite my flaws, I understand it a little bit better and I am so much more thankful for The Love that died so that I could live.

Now my debt is paid, it is paid in full,

By the precious blood that my Jesus spilled.

Now the curse of sin has no hold on me.

Whom the Son sets free, oh is free indeed!