IVP - Strangely Dim - Seeking After Easter

Seeking After Easter

Today's post is the second in an occasional series by Kady Bram, friend of Likewise and senior at Northwestern College who's about to complete her degrees in religion and writing & rhetoric. Kady loves reading, writing and snuggling with a slobbery bulldog named Ellie. In this post she reflects on eggs. A lot.

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Easter this year unearthed a lot of memories for me, most of them from when I was little. Perhaps that's why they are still so strikingly vivid--many things that often seem insignificant to grown-ups contain within them a world of wonder when seen through the eyes of a child.

Take the Easter egg: what once was white, common, and sold in every grocery store in the country can be transformed, by simply soaking in a vinegar bath of fizzing color, into a beautifully unique treasure. Painted, dyed or crayoned, the egg can then be scooped up with dozens of other special creations to be placed under bushes, behind rocks and in the forks of tree branches.

For a child there is hardly anything more exciting in the world than the discovery of your first egg on Easter day. But then what? Children don't seem to think about what happens to the eggs after they have been hidden, hunted and found. I mean, there are really only so many ways to eat them--even fewer if you consider celebrating Easter with deviled eggs slightly blasphemous.

The thrill, it turns out, has very little to do with eggs. It's about the excitement of the hunt, searching out those small, hidden treasures.

The Bible uses the word treasure approximately eighty times to describe things both tangible and unseen. It speaks of precious metals like silver and gold, and staples that sustain human life, like wheat, oil, and honey; but it also points out treasures that we cannot grasp literally. Wisdom and knowledge, the fear of the Lord, his words and the nation of Israel as his chosen people--all these are described in language similar to that of something rare and valuable that is meant to be cherished. We are admonished to explore God's Word and seek after wisdom as we would search for hidden treasure.

Why then, as grown-ups, do we struggle so much with something that seemed to come so naturally to us as children? There are limitless gems, gifts from God, to be found in reading and studying his Word, yet we are rarely excited about beginning or continuing a hunt for treasure in the pages of our Bibles. Why is it that in our search we have lost our wonder--the sparkle in our eyes--that we experienced so abundantly as children?

Is our culture to blame--the mountain of items on our to-do list, the forest of commitments competing for our attention? Maybe somewhat, but I think most of our problems stem from within. Perhaps we remember rotten eggs from our past--those things we devoted ourselves to that, in the end, didn't prove worthy of our attention. Maybe we find it humiliating to continue climbing trees, turning over rocks, and rustling through bushes looking for seemingly elusive answers to our questions. Maybe we get in our own way.

This is what the story of the children coming to Jesus in Mark 10 means to me. Jesus commands his disciples not to send the kids away, but rather to learn from the example of their faith. Having a childlike faith is not merely possessing blind trust in something we cannot see, but instead daring to seek him without fear.

What a lofty, yet worthy, ambition it would be to seek after God with the exuberance and abandon of a child. It's a treasure in and of itself--one that we didn't hide so much as lose track of, one we'll have to set out to seek if it's to mean anything to us, but one that's definitely worth searching for.

Posted by Dave Zimmerman at April 15, 2009 8:41 AM