Easter is coming and I almost didn’t notice.
That used to be impossible. Easter meant something. It had weight. It had morning light and something in the air that told you this day is different. This day matters. Even if you couldn’t put the theology into words you felt it. Everybody did. It was in the town. It was in the people around you.
We didn’t do Christmas this year. No tree. No gifts. Not because we couldn’t. Because the feeling wasn’t there. And decorating without the feeling is just moving furniture around in an empty house.
I’ve been sitting with that. Trying to figure out when it left and where it went.
Here’s what I think happened.
It wasn’t an accident. The joy didn’t just fade the way old photographs fade sitting in a drawer. It was worked on. Deliberately. Consistently. The plan wasn’t to frighten us into compliance. Fear makes people fight. The plan was to exhaust us. Burn us down slow. Bury us in bad news and conflict and noise until we couldn’t feel the difference between a regular Tuesday and Easter morning.
You can’t fight what you can’t feel. That’s the whole game.
There’s a movie most of us have seen. George Bailey stands on a bridge in Bedford Falls ready to give up. And an angel shows him what the town looks like without him. Pottersville. Same streets. Same buildings. But cold. Transactional. Mean. Nobody holding anybody together.
That’s the town we’re living in now. Pottersville. Built brick by brick by people who understood that if you remove the connective tissue — the shared holidays, the family rituals, the sense that this day means something we all agree on — the people stop holding each other together. They stop believing anything is worth celebrating. And then they comply. Not because they were forced. Because they’re too emptied out to resist.
Easter is the hardest story to kill because the story itself is about refusing to stay dead. That’s not a coincidence. Resurrection is a direct threat to a system built on depletion. So they bury the meaning. Drown it in plastic grass and candy and sales. Leave the shell. Remove the substance.
But here’s what I know after all the years I’ve lived.
The feeling doesn’t have to wait for the culture to bring it back. The culture isn’t going to bring it back. Two people. One morning. A deliberate choice that says this day is different. This day matters. That’s how it starts again. Small. Quiet. True.
They took Bedford Falls. George Bailey rebuilt it one person at a time.
So can we.
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