Easter Eggs

Last year I posted on Facebook about my Easter egg fail. I didn't have any vinegar, and then I couldn't find the egg dye or any food coloring. A friend in the States went straight to the store on Easter Monday and bought up a stack of Easter egg dye left on the shelves. It took a while to get here, but it didn't matter, because there was a whole year before I'd need it. Now I'm set for the next five years, at least, unless I take up dyeing twelve dozen, like my Salvation Army officer friend, V., did this year.

So we colored eggs. See how imperfect they are? When you peel the shell off to eat them, the dye has seeped through the cracks in lovely patterns. For a mom like me, who can't even get organized enough to have the supplies on hand, and isn't dyeing eggs for hordes of orphans like saintly V. is, these eggs speak of grace and mercy. Friends who help me out, color that makes life beautiful in spite of the messes I make. A God who entered history, died on a cross, rose from the grave. Resurrection, an Easter morning when friends trudged to a garden to prepare the brutalized body of their loved master, only to find that everything that had seemed irretrievably lost and broken and destroyed suddenly was dazzlingly new and strange and incomprehensibly glorious. Not comfortable, necessarily; change never is. I imagine it's not comfortable for the caterpillar to become a butterfly.

There are still many cracks in Haiti, many broken places - and not just here. Creation groans, everywhere. But the resurrection is real. Thank God for that.