Guest Blog: No Greater Love

Kat of Toulouse Confessions returns with her guest post on "resurrection" today...

Today’s prompt from Drama Mama was “resurrection”. Pretty obvious why, although she made it clear that I in no way had to actually use the word in my post. I thought about trying to be overly creative and write about something other than Easter as by Monday morning we will all be suffering from belly aches over eating too many eggs, both deviled and chocolate, but I am not going to. Instead I am going to get something off my chest that I have been thinking about for awhile now.

I grew up in the church. It was labelled as Non-denominational. I had no idea what that meant while I was growing up and now that I am grown up I am pretty sure it just means they couldn’t come up with anything to call themselves. That isn’t really here nor there. The point I am coming to is that I grew up with Easter dresses that we showed off AT church, sitting through the plays and songs and the other usual things that churches do on Easter. I was told that Jesus came and died and then rose again and that was Easter. Well, that and an Easter basket….can’t forget I’m talking about being a kid.

When I was in high school stuff starting happening in my family life that turned my world upside down and the church wasn’t there for us. So much time was always spent talking about “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16) and yet it seemed like the message my church was giving me was: “well, God’s love for you should be enough” because they certainly didn’t have any for me or my family. They left us high and dry, judging a situation they knew nothing about because they couldn’t even be bothered to ask from afar until we left. Which seemed to us exactly what they wanted us to do.

I left the church behind when I started college, although I never stopped believing in God or basing certain decisions in my life on the guidance of the Bible, but when we found out my nephew had a rare genetic disease that wouldn’t allow him to live pat 2 years old I went back to my roots. Not to that church that left me behind, but back to the Bible and to a church that seemed to have more love.

To keep a story short, becoming a mother only made my thirst for answers greater and lately I have found great teachings and consolation from a certain preacher who has everything on the internet for me to listen to. I am learning about the LOVE of God, the love that I never really understood because it was never taught to me correctly. My conclusion as to why is that for many people who never really have anything BAD happen to them like death of a child or brother/sister/parent, cancer or some other health issue or the kind of divorce that rips out the insides of the people who live it. The list of BAD things could go on, but there are certainly people out there who never really live anything TOO bad and for them just repeating John 3:16 and going on with their lives is enough. For the rest of us, it isn’t just enough to repeat that verse, we need to see it.

I have learned to see it in the day that we call Easter. Because it isn’t just about Jesus died and rose again….let’s eat some chocolate. It is more about love that most churches want to admit or preach. That God loved ME, He loved YOU with the kind of love that we have for our children and yet hundreds of times more because the definition of God is: LOVE. He loved us so much that He sent his Son not only to just die and rise again, but to conquer death, sickness, poverty and everything else that is BAD. By dying and rising again he conquered anything that can be considered a curse so that we don’t have to live with it. He LOVED me….so that nothing BAD ever has to happen to me again.

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Thanks, Kat, for such a gorgeously written post. I'm excited to have you hanging out at the Poop today.

Did everyone have a great Easter?