Carried Along

Easter is one of my favorite holidays. With Easter comes the hope of new life in Christ, Springtime, and wonderful memories of sunrise services and Easter egg hunts. And this year when we aren’t having Easter services or family gatherings, it is a time for us, as believers, to really reflect on the true meaning of this time. No busyness, no distractions. So, as I reflected personally this week, I was suddenly reminded of one moment, the moment I really understood how shocking Easter really is.

My sophomore year in college I traveled to China with some classmates to teach English. The assignment was about 6 weeks total and included some travel and sight-seeing as well as teaching a summer English program in a remote region of China called Xinjiang Province. Xinjiang is a fascinating place near where Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was filmed and from which came some of the Uighur men imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay came from. The students I taught that summer, most of which were 3 or 4 years younger than me at the time, were kind, happy, and eager to learn. Teachers in China are revered, and at age 20, if I even appeared to be disappointed in them, they quickly tried to make me happy by sitting up straight and paying attention. There were over 40 students in my class, and 99% of the time you could hear a pin drop except for one day, one lesson to be exact. In my class, my students knew basic English, so we were improving our English as well as teaching them culture. Now, they had seen English movies, so they really thought we were all like Michael Jackson or “Pretty in Pink”. I remember standing in a very hot Soviet style building with live electrical wires we had to avoid talking about holidays. The lessons were very basic explanations of American holidays and their meanings. As I began to explain the Easter holiday, my entire class burst out laughing all at once, not chuckling but laughing uncontrollably. They were asking questions like, “He rose from the dead?” in complete shock that anyone would believe such a complete falsehood.