I find that Meredith Miller's Kids + Faith Substack posts are filled with absolute gems of truth and this week is no different. This is the final post in a series she did about Easter. I'm happy to share the complete six-week series with you, if you'd like to read them all. He is RISEN!
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From Kids + Faith by Meredith Miller

Back in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, when we kept at least a fifty foot radius between us and any other humans we might meet, my husband started taking walks. Long walks. Make sure you put your sunscreen on because you’d regret it if you don’t walks.

He did this especially if he had something he wanted to think about and needed space to turn it over in his head for a while. Because our kids woke up and began to talk and there was noise in the house for the next 13 hours until their bedtime.

One day on said walk, sunscreen liberally applied, he was working on his Easter sermon. (We are both lead pastors of our church.)

What were we going to do as a church community to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection on tiny Zoom screens from our individual living rooms for Easter 2020? How is Jesus’ life good news when the headlines are filled with stories of death?

He’d gotten about half a block from our house, when this big shaggy dog came bounding past him. No one was around, so he kept walking. But this dog just kept trotting along, and Curtis kept trying to think about Easter, but the dog kept following. He found himself more and more thinking about the dog and where it lived, and what he should do about it, and less and less thinking about Easter.

Eventually he stopped and looked at the dog’s tag, which fortunately had an address on it of a house that was a couple blocks back and around the corner. He turned around, took the dog back, and as he walked up the driveway, a woman and boy popped their heads out. They said thanks and he went on his way, glad that he could finally think about Easter now!

But then Curtis started wondering, why did that just happen? Like, it’s not everyday that a stray dog comes following him on a walk. In fact, that hadn’t ever really happened before.

It felt interesting. Unusual. Unexpected.

Maybe it was just due to the fact that he’d been reading a lot of Jeremiah at the time, a prophet who does things like find deep theological meaning in a tilted pot of soup, but Curtis started wondering whether there might be more there than met the eye, despite generally not being the type to wonder such a thing.

But as he reflected on the whole experience through that lens – what might this have to say to us about Easter? – he kept coming back to the specific words the woman had said when he brought the dog back up the driveway, “He just keeps getting out, and I don’t know how he does it!”

“He just keeps getting out,
and I don’t know how he does it!”

That pandemic Easter our church talked about this: the Bible is the story of how God just keeps getting out.

The forces of death, evil, despair, oppression, sickness, chaos, destruction, over and over think they’ve won, they’ve forced God in, God can’t possibly escape, and then life springs forth again.

That’s the story of our history as the people of God, and it continues to be. Over and over, even in the darkest of days, God leaves the forces of darkness to grind their teeth and say:

“Life just keeps getting out, and we don’t know how it does it!”

When we see that our God makes life break out, it helps us meet kids with one, an acknowledgement of that death, that its pain is real, and its grief is meant to be felt. And two, a hope that the death can be real, but not the end. Hope becomes powerful, not trite, when we can tell them that God really does understand sorrow and hopelessness and meets humanity there with a real solution.

As you think about the kids you’ll be with this Easter, what one piece of Good News do they most need?

peace
seeing God’s true character
seeing who we really are
freedom from the power of sin
justice, and
life.

They aren’t the only reasons Easter is good news, but they are all important reasons that go beyond the chance to have a ticket to a future home in the clouds after you die and don’t hinge on the notion that sin must be punished.

So which one does your kid need this year? Which one do you need?

It's good news that God keeps getting out. Love is RISEN, indeed!