Happy Easter!! For me, it was the one where everything changed.

This was the year it all made sense...and made me long for the cross even more.

We’ve been having a great Easter week. Kids are back in school (some had Spring Break last week and Easter Monday off), I’m back to homeschooling the others, back to treatment, and back to walking dogs. I’m definitely still on a high from this past weekend and all the things that came together for me. It was filled with family time, more graces than I could imagine, and a firm settling in the life God has chosen for me.

While I’m venturing back to normalcy, I’ve been taking time to reflect on last week (Holy Week) and this weekend (Easter and the Triduum). It was a time set apart, full of regular life interspersed with moments that touched heaven. I felt like I stepped out of the world a bit, though. I guess that’s what’s supposed to happen during Holy Week and Easter: we leave this world and go back to His. Maybe that’s what’s supposed to happen always, but this time it was quite extraordinary.

Let me tell you a bit about it…because this Easter, everything changed. Well, maybe more like everything solidified. All of the confusion coming together in the form of realizations that set life on fire.

Just when I least expected it…

There I was last week, sitting in the pew with Alex and the kids, waiting for the Good Friday Mass of the Presanctified to begin.

(Sidenote, if you’ve never had to chance to attend the pre-1955 or even pre-1962 Holy Week Traditional Catholic services, I highly encourage trying to find one next year. They are something else, ripe with all the things that pull back the veil between this world and the next…)

We went to Holy Thursday Mass the night before, then Alex and I and a couple kids snuck away in the night to go back for Adoration. It’s always been a dream of mine to spend time with Jesus on Holy Thursday night and this year I could finally do it. Except I fell asleep. Not sure if I was resting in God or one of the sleeping Apostles. Either way, I was there.

But back to Friday.

I can’t begin to tell you the joy that flooded my body and soul while sitting there.

In previous years, it had been tears. Tears over the passion I would unite with His. Tears over what He was walking, what I walked, too. I buried my spouse, and every year would walk with Jesus to His death and burial, too, knowing all too well what a sliver of it felt like.

But this year was different.

In the garden?? JOY.

Carrying the cross?? JOY.

Being stripped and nailed?? JOY.

And St. Paul flooded my mind and I thought to myself, THIS is what it means to glory in the Cross of Christ.

In those moments of joy in that pew, I felt nothing other than pride and happiness for every single cross I carried. They were presented to me as my greatest treasures. They were shown to be the main thing I could glory in.

No other accomplishment or possession came close.

And I walked the days of the Triduum with the knowing and experiencing that every cross, every difficult thing I’ve walked in life (whether lived through or actively chosen), would be the means of my greatest joys, both then and for all my days to come.

In fact, as Alex and I crawled into bed Sunday night, after Vigil the night before and a day with family, we both just looked at each other and knew that this Easter was something different. After all the work of combining families, of trial and error, God had blessed our efforts, too. And this holiday came with a lot of peace and joy and marked another step into the family God has risen from the ashes of death.

I won’t bore you with all our Easter details (I do have a few more things I’d love to share soon!), but I do want to leave you with this thought to ponder:

At some point, if you stick it out long enough, your crosses will become your greatest joys. You will learn how to rejoice because of them. The pain won’t go away, but it will be accompanied by faith, hope, happiness, and more love than you could imagine. In all of life, there is nothing that comes close to the cross. Don’t be so quick to cast it aside. Embrace it, let it change you, let it be the means of your resurrection.

Whether that cross is borne in your health, vocation, marriage, parenthood, in your faith, family, job or finances, kiss it and carry it well. Learn how to be happy, joyful, and loving through what it brings in your life. Its fruits will be returned to you when you least expect it. And you will bless that very cross you long to curse, the one you’ve carried all this time.

Happy Easter!!

Love, Kristine