As we celebrate another Easter what comes to mind? Rays of dazzling light, an empty tomb, lilies, Easter eggs, Easter bunnies, Easter baskets, brightly-coloured fabric and the Carifta Games.

Each of these things has its place but Easter is really about:

• Hope where there is no hope
• Overcoming impossible odds, and
• Climbing over insurmountable obstacles.

Jesus rising from the dead is the greatest image in the Christian Religion. It causes the cross to have meaning. It is a symbol of God’s newness and renewal, God’s change, and God’s solution to some of the most difficult situations of life.

The resurrection is a symbol of the fact that nothing is “over” until GOD says that it is “over”.  This is the fire that has burned in the hearts of believers in every age, helping them to face ALL that life brings, and to persevere and to overcome.

Jesus called the disciples and others to follow Him because, in following Him, they would find a path where the “cannots” of the world are overcome by the “cans” of God’s plan, and where the things otherwise impossible are overcome by God working them out in God’s way and time.

This is why the words of that great hymn for St. Andrew’s Day, written by Cecil Frances Alexander (1818 – 1895) are true every day of the year:

“Jesus calls us o’er the tumult

Of all our life’s wild restless sea;

Day by day his sweet voice soundeth

Saying Christian follow me”.

The power of the resurrection calls us away from the tumult of life to live our best overcoming life in God, to live the life that we can ONLY live in God.

A Happy Easter to you and yours from the Anglican Diocese of The Bahamas and The Turks and Caicos Islands.