Happy Easter!

In the winter of 1992, late in February, I decided, not entirely through my own will, to read the Bible for the first time in my life. Just weeks prior, quite suddenly and without warning, I found myself in a new and unfamiliar situation. Suffice it to say that I was no longer part of a clique in which I had done some very harmful things to myself.

I was searching through some other spiritual books of different faiths and some shallow new-agey type stuff, but nothing satisfied this weird new void in my life. Something – or was it Someone? – was nudging me in a certain direction, but I couldn’t fathom just what I was supposed to do. Then, somehow or someway, it dawned on me that I should read through the Bible.

I still had a tattered pocket-size King James Bible that I received from Vacation Bible School nearly twenty years previously. So, I read the tiny, crayon-marked Bible. Hid it in a desk drawer at work. Read it at traffic lights. In the bathtub. Tough, the archaic 17th-century language and all, but I muddled through it. Something strange indeed was going on.

Sadly surprised, I was not satisfied. So I switched to a modern-day translation (I forget which but it’s the very 70’s one with the simple line-drawing illustrations), and began over from Genesis. Read all the way to Revelation. Marked it up with a highlighter. It took me two months, and believe me, I couldn’t put it down.

And I was transformed. By Easter, 1992, and I say this with no exaggeration, I was a new person. I looked around the world with new eyes. Reality felt – really felt … different. Lighter. I felt as if a twenty-pound lead vest, like the one that the dentist lays on you before taking X-rays, was lifted off me. I knew it was the burden from Matthew 11. I was happier. Optimistic. Hopeful. Stronger. And these were definitely new feelings for me.

Happy Easter!