Jesus Ahead of Me

This year, I packed what will most likely be my son’s last Easter basket. He’s headed off to college next year, and while it is within the realm of possibility that he would return home for Easter weekend, it’s unlikely. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea—there is nothing special about the Easter baskets that are assembled in our household. My husband and I are both priests serving in full-time parish ministry. Chocolate and marshmallow bunnies are hastily thrown in the same basket that gets taken out of the basement year after year at some point between Good Friday and Easter sermon writing. It is assembled with deep love, but no artistry or grand gestures. It gets the job done, but nobody’s going to really miss it. 

I have never been one of those parents who looks misty-eyed at their children, wishing they could return to infancy. This is partially due to circumstance: like many households, my husband and I spent our children’s earliest years racing from home to daycare to work to daycare to the dinner table to bed, only to get up in the morning and do it all again with a church committee meeting added in. On many days, it felt like our home lives were pasted together with twine and duct tape.  Sometimes my congregational life felt like that, too!  Our kids are 2 ½ years apart, so as soon as the older one was more self-sufficient, along came another who needed absolutely everything. Parenting small children is hard—spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Moments of sheer delight and transcendence are punctuated by the marathon of All The Things.  

I don’t know if I’d be more nostalgic for their early childhood if the time had felt easier. Of course, parenting at any age is hard.  18 years ago, I was tired on Sunday morning because I’d nursed a baby at midnight. Now, I’m tired because I’m listening for that same baby to come home at midnight. There are very practical (and largely self-centered) reasons I reject nostalgia. I reject it for a theological one, too. 

Parenting is an honor: it is to be a fellow traveler accompanying these remarkable people in the work of living.  In their early lives, they are building a picture of their exterior world. In their later teen years, they build their interior world, as they become self-reflective and begin to piece together what their own values and interests are. The holy invitation is to see them as the people they actually are. Falling into a nostalgia that longs for them to be somebody they used to be is willful ignorance. This is the work of love: to be awake to who the person in front of you actually is. 

There were days when our lives were filled with stories of princesses and knights and Busytown, and now our days are filled with track meets and rides to meet friends. My 8-year-old was preoccupied by how much money he and his sister could make selling lemonade in the dead of Massachusetts winter.  My now 18-year-old is preoccupied by the history of the Federal Reserve Bank. I myself have no answers for either of those things (though they definitely had the market cornered on that lemonade stand).

I will have a few more Easter baskets to make; my daughter is still in 9th grade, so I don’t have to buy my own marshmallow Peeps just yet. But as I put my son’s last one together, I willed my heavy, almost-done-with-the-Easter-sermon eyes open: open to the joy of today, while offering gratitudes and goodbyes for yesterday. 

Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me” (Matthew 28:10, NRSVue).

Jesus is with us now and assures us that wherever we go next, he will be there, too. He goes ahead, whether it be to Galilee or college or summer camp or any other rite of passage. We don’t always have the discipline to notice God in the present, but it is comforting to know that wherever we go next, there will always be a new opportunity to find and be found.