I currently lack the order of mind to really put down what I’d like to about Easter. With all the moment-to-moment demands of four children, I seldom feel that I’m able to attend as fully to lent, Holy Week, and Easter itself as I’d like to. Fortunately, there are several wonderful churches in San Marcos that collaborate on a devotional walk through the hill country during lent. There are fourteen spots for reflection along the walk, pattered on the Stations of the Cross. Thinking that walking this path and reading the meditations would be an ideal way to have the kids participate a bit more fully in the holiday, Kathy and I took them out there yesterday. Even that, however, was an abortive attempt, as the rain came pelting down in torrents just as we reached the halfway point of the walk. We scampered back to the car, cold and sodden, and drove back home to make hot chocolate and dry off.

So, my prayer this Easter is that God would accept the meager offerings which are all we seem able to muster these days — grace interrupted by noisy burps, half-completed devotional walks, prayers snatched from the voracious fangs of our calendar as we walk from one place to another, and a too-occasional breathed “thank you” for the beauty of spring. We give to God what we have, what we are, even when that seems more like passing on a debt or scraping something weeks-dead from the highway and putting a bow on it than it does giving a gift of value.

He is risen. He is risen indeed. Thank heaven for it.

Here are a few more worthwhile meditations on this zenith of the Christian year: Fanny’s Easter Thoughts, and a sermon Barry heard at the Salisbury cathedral ten years ago.