The Miracle of Easter Egg Leftovers

Back in olden days, the Easter bunny didn’t know how to lay plastic eggs. She [assumed pronoun] produced the hard-boiled, dyed, and colorful real things to hide in obscure places for kids to find on the annual “hunt”. Those adventurous searches for Easter eggs were quite daunting at times. When the game ended, the winner had the most eggs in her or his baskets. A few eggs were never found for many days, maybe even weeks. By then, however, they were easy to locate because of the stench that led you to find these Easter leftovers.

Even before the putrid smell of decaying eggs in your yard got your attention, there was something rotten about the whole Easter egg enterprise. I vividly recall one hunt when the youth group was in charge of running the show, which entailed procuring and hiding the eggs and refereeing the Easter morning event with the kids of the church. The children of assorted ages gathered on the front steps of the church awaiting the signal to begin the mad dashes throughout a prescribed area with an unspoken imperative to get as many as you can before someone else got there ahead of you.

Jordy was the youngest and smallest hunter who inadvertently got a late start. As the bigger egg chasers were stuffing their baskets and bringing the melee to an apparent finale, Jordy’s basket was empty, and his countenance was extremely woeful and dismayed. Assessing the situation as unjust and beyond the pail of Christian charity, I called together a couple of youth sponsors and urged them to rectify our problem. Meanwhile, I took Jordy on a spin around the building and returned to the scene of the earlier crime where he happened to discover four rather obviously placed eggs.

As the two of us made our way back to the other hunters who were counting their bountiful loot, Jordy took my hand and stopped me in my tracks. In awe, he held up his little basket with four eggs and exclaimed: “It’s a miracle!”

We seem to have forgotten that lesson we learned in kindergarten…that one about sharing. It is quite obvious that the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, both nationally and globally, has been growing exponentially over the past few decades and torn the fabric of our E Pluribus Unum. Those who seem to have their baskets full don’t really give a rip about those without an egg to their name. They have learned to live with lavish lifestyles as if the game of life is defined by the Easter-egg-hunt aspiration and assumption that those who end up with the most wealth or whatever, win.

Operating from a perspective of limited scarcity, we just don’t see the surplus of common wealth beyond belief. Consequently, we are selfishly headed for our tombs with all our eggs in the wrong baskets. Or, to paraphrase Jesus right after he pulled a reverse-Jordy miracle to feed five thousand people with a little boy’s two fish and five loaves, “…where’s the profit if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?” By the time the crowd had eaten the kid’s fish and bread, the disciples collected twelve Easter baskets full of leftovers.

Other than when Jesus said that “unless we become like children” we don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing the kingdom of heaven, do you see what Jordy had in common with Him? They both epitomized what would become the watchword of this Stumbling Over Stardust blogging endeavor: “With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us.”