Resurrection: Foolish or Wisdom? Fiction or Fact?

I was a skeptic. As a teenager raised partly in the Church and partly not, the story of the God who became human was fantastic, foolish fiction to me. The resurrection made absolutely no sense to me. Reading Voltaire, Sartre, and other philosophers in my private school curriculum only made me hopeless.

I grew up hearing the Easter story and remember distinctly, at a very young age, deciding it couldn’t be true. But the emptiness and the hopelessness that followed set me on a search for some sort of fulfillment. It ranged from people pleasing to alcohol to athletic performance, smoking and generally trying to fit in and be “cool.”

In my quest to find nice cute boys my mom convinced me to attend a local church youth group. At Christmas time that year we went caroling to the homes of older members of our Church. It was a Currier and Ives snowy night complete with the hush of the gently falling snow and the glistening from the reflection of the street lights off every flake.

We had meaningful conversations with many of the elders throughout the evening.  These, with the hush outside, helped me  to be open to what happened next. When we came to the last home, a slender woman with white hair opened the door, and we sang some traditional hymn to her about the birth of Jesus. I do not remember which hymn, but I do remember, even now, the wistful sparkle in her eyes as we sang about Jesus. It was clear to me that she knew something I did not. It was also clear to me that I wanted to know what she knew. In the end it turned out to be who she knew.