Morning Comes

(Photo taken in 2010)

Our Easter morning began early - 5:00 to be exact. We had coffee and drove a few miles down the road to a hilltop farm/ranch where I spent many happy hours growing up. Uncle Younger and Aunt Rena Mae were like second parents to me, and I miss them. If they were looking down on us yesterday, I'm sure they were pleased at what they saw and heard.

Arriving in the dark moments before morning, we carried our lawn chairs into the pasture and joined others who had come to celebrate His resurrection. Our chairs facing the eastern skies, we prayed, we sang, and we remembered that first Easter morning - when morning came and mourning departed. Then Came the Morning, a song that means so very much to me, played on a battery-operated boom box and we sang along . . . and we watched as morning light replaced the darkness. A tinge of pink began to color the eastern sky. A cool breeze blew across the pasture, and the presence of our Risen Saviour swept across our hearts . . . the perfect beginning for an Easter morning!

That was enough encouragement and promise and hope, but God, who knows exactly where we are, added more assurance. It was an amazing "God moment"! As we pulled onto the highway, I turned up the radio - which I always have tuned to XM Enlighten. You wanna' guess what song was playing? You got it . . . and I GOT it:

Then came the morning; night turned into day.
The stone was rolled away; hope rose with the dawn.
Then came the morning; shadows vanished before the sun.
Death had lost and Life had won, for morning had come.

It is a morning I'll always remember and revisit when I'm tempted to give up in the dark times. Morning always follows the night, no matter how long that night may seem. The Risen Jesus is a God of mornings! He's not a God of coincidences, so it didn't "just happen" that I read these words from Our Daily Bread this morning:

"If you believe that the Son of God died and rose again," writes George MacDonald, "your whole future is full of the dawn of eternal morning, coming up beyond the hills of life, and full of such hope as the highest imagination for the poet has not a glimmer yet." . . . Since we have this life and the next, we don't have to "have it all" now. We can live in broken and ruined bodies for a time; we can endure poverty and hardship for a while; we can face loneliness , heartache and pain for a season. Why? There is a second birth -- life in heaven forever.

~David Roper~