Hello Internet!!
I hope everyone is having a wonderful Easter! Maybe you’re enjoying the day by having Brunch with your family, or going to an Easter Egg Hunt, or going to Church for the first time since Christmas, or maybe you’re just enjoying a day off work and you’re sleeping in. No matter what you’re doing, I hope you are having a wonderful day and I feel blessed you took some time out of your day to read this! Today’s Weekly Blog is all about Easter as well as Holy Week. I’m kind of combining my usual Weekly Blog that I post every Sunday with a special update one that I usually do when holidays occur. Also this post is going to be full of religion, my beliefs, and talking about Easter as a religious holiday. I know that religion can sometimes be a divisive subject for people so I wanted to state that upfront if you couldn’t tell by what I’ve said so far or by the featured image at the top. If you don’t mash well with religion (especially Christianity), then maybe sit this one out and check out some other pieces. This piece may come off as a little “preachy” and I don’t want people to be turned off by it. Just a suggestion, you can be the judge whether or not you want to read this piece.
Now the holiday of Easter is one where I feel like the commercialization of it hasn’t completely surpassed the religious aspect of it. A holiday like Christmas for example is the epitome of a religious holiday becoming the center for shopping, spending money, and commercialization. Easter has some of that too with Easter candy, the Easter Bunny, Easter Baskets, and other Easter traditions, but overall I believe the religious factor surrounding Jesus, his crucifixion, and his resurrection still takes center stage this time of year. This becomes clearer when you include Holy Week and religious significance. Now for people you don’t know what Holy Week is, it is the week following up to Easter which also marks the last week of Lent. It starts with Palm Sunday which celebrates the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem and people laid palm leaves down on the road for the donkey to walk on. There is also Maudy Thursday which celebrates Jesus having the Last Supper with his disciples. Then there’s Good Friday which pays tribute to Jesus’ crucifixion and his death. Finally there’s Easter (which people are probably more familiar with) which celebrates Jesus’ resurrection and return to Earth. All of Holy Week celebrates Jesus and his sacrifice of his life for all of humanity and his return to Earth three days after his death. For Christians, the week leading up to Easter and Easter itself are huge events full of historical and spiritual significance and the idea of Jesus coming to Earth, dying for humanity’s sins, and then being resurrected is pretty much the bedrock for Christianity as a whole. So it’s a big deal which overshadows plastic eggs and the Easter Bunny.
I know that I haven’t really talked about religion or my faith before on the website, so I thought I’d talk a little about it and its connection to Easter. I don’t want to dive too deep into religion and theology and my beliefs, but I do want to share my thoughts on Easter. I didn’t really realize how much I loved Easter until it was actually upon me. By far my favorite holiday is Christmas, but when I really started to think about Easter and Holy Week, I realized how much I really love it. I think my love for Easter and Holy week is that its such a profound moment and so significant and it truly represents what Christianity is supposed to be about. I’m not a huge fan of organized religion as an institution and I think a lot of bad people have used religion to justify doing bad things. But Easter reminds me is that religion isn’t about restrictive rules or about these things that disenfranchise people from church or religion. Holy Week and Easter show me that Christianity is supposed to be about God’s love, Jesus’ sacrifice, and having a relationship with God.
John 3:16 says “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (NIV) I know that’s a pretty common Bible verse and people usually skim over pretty quickly, but if you take a moment to really think about it, you’ll realize how much weight it has behind it. This omnipotent, and all-knowing God who created everything in the universe and knows you by name, sent his only son (Jesus) to Earth to live as a human. This man felt hunger, pain, sadness, happiness, and all kinds of human emotions and experiences to gain a perspective on humanity from a first person point of view. This man was then betrayed by one of his best friends, drug through the streets and beaten, he was tortured and humiliated, tried for a crime he didn’t commit, and faced the death penalty. He was crucified, which is not a fun way to die by any means, and he bore the weight of the world’s sins. He died for your sins and mine and three days later he conquered death and rose from the grave. He did all of those things for you so that when you die, you can go to Heaven and spend an eternity of happiness with him. That is amazing!
That’s what the focus of this day should be about. Easter is about love and God sacrificing what he loved the most so that he could spend an eternity with you. Because he loved you that much! It’s almost impossible to wrap your mind around that. Well at least it is for me. It’s hard sometimes when life gets busy or when things get hard to spend time with God and it is easy to look at the world and only see all these bad things. In those moments I think the best thing to do is look at the events surrounding Easter and how that turned out. The world was crazy then too. There was war, poverty, sickness, corruption, natural disasters, and all kinds of bad things going on. And in that world, God chose to send his son down to us as the savior of the world. That’s the kind of love that keeps me going and keeps me looking at the bright things in life. I am so grateful that I’ve heard this message and I’ve adopted it as my ideology. I know that religious institutions and the breakdown of different Christian Denominations can sometimes muddy that crystal clear message, but sometimes you just need to refocus on what matters most. God’s love.
Well I hope you enjoyed that piece no matter if you’re a Christian, another religion, or non-religious. No matter what you’re doing today, I hope you have a Happy Easter! Thanks for reading this piece and I hope you come back to read more pieces as they are produced. My Weekly Blogs can be found under the “Weekly Blog” tab and they range in subject matter all over the map. I also have many different creative writing pieces and some older political pieces if that interests you.
Thank you so much for your support and I hope you have a wonderful week!!
-Allen_The_Writer
Allen The Writer 
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