Easter is Adoption and Redemption

So we just celebrated Easter at the Moore house, and we had a great time.  Hopefully, you did, too!  I'm not sure how you all celebrated, but we tend to do the traditional Easter egg-dying, which I'm not sure why, except that it's fun.  My kids *love* *love* *love* to hide Easter eggs and find them.  They love dying the eggs, and subsequently eating the eggs.  It seems to me to have nothing to do with Jesus, but it's a ton of fun, so we do it anyway.

We all know, though, that Easter is NOT about eggs, or bunnies, or chocolate.

Easter is about redemption.
It's the story of our redemption as Jesus saw our extreme need, our epic failures, our inability to live life as he had directed, and the sin that had chained each of us in our unique ways.  He saw that and he made a plan to bring us to right standing with our Father. 

He said to each of us:

I love you.
I love you when you don't even know me.
I see value in you when you can't see value in yourself.
I will protect you.
I will make you mine.
We will be family.
I will count you as heirs with my son, Jesus.
I will bring you healing.

We didn't deserve it; we hadn't yet asked for it.  In fact, we didn't know we needed it.  We thought we'd be okay on our own.  We thought we could figure out this life by ourselves -- that we were strong enough, smart enough and brave enough.  And we each have our own story about how we finally realized that we weren't all the things we thought we were.  And there was Jesus.  He had already loved us, had already died for us, had already conquered death, and was waiting for us to realize that we needed Him.   

Is that the story of our children?  They don't always know their need.  They might have been placed in an orphanage, or a foster home, and they possibly thought: this is life . . .  with a hopeless resolution that life wouldn't and couldn't be better than what they had always known.  Maybe they had a dream of a family, but maybe they had given up that dream long ago.

But we had a better plan, didn't we!
We knew more about them than they knew about themselves.  We had a hope for them that possibly they didn't have for themselves.  And we loved them, loved them more than ourselves, loved them when they didn't love us, loved them despite their wounds, loved them past their hurt.  We said to them, I will make you mine.  We will be family.

It's a redemption story that's almost as beautiful as what Christ did for each of us.
We are doubly blessed.

I know it's a little late, but
Happy Easter.