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In her Easter message last Sunday, Pastor Alison spoke about the idea that resurrection is not the same thing as reversal. She said: "Just like Jesus was changed through suffering and resurrection, so too are we. In our resurrected selves, the marks of past wounds and the new life God breathes into us coexist and intertwine. We are made new without completely erasing the old. Jesus’s resurrection gives us hope that there is life after death, both at the end of our lives and after the smaller 'deaths' we experience daily. But this new life, breathed into us by the Holy Spirit, is not a simple return to how things once were. Instead it’s a movement forward into someplace new. Beauty and wisdom and goodness exist in the new terrain, but they may look very different. This seems to be the way that God works." Pastor Alison encouraged us to consider the totality of Jesus's life — to acknowledge that pain and suffering and death are all parts of the human experience and also to remember that God’s resurrection power is at work. Someone who really gets this complexity is Kate Bowler, an author and professor at Duke Divinity School. One of Bowler’s research topics was the American prosperity gospel — the belief that God guarantees health, wealth, and happiness. After writing a book on this topic, in a sort of tragic, ironic twist, Bowler was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage IV cancer at age 35. While she was in treatment and not expected to survive, Bowler wrote two memoirs about how her perspectives on life and faith had been fundamentally changed as a result of her diagnosis. Bowler discovered that “life is so beautiful and life is so hard. For everyone.”  Our short time on Earth is filled with ups and downs, twists and turns. It is filled with weeping and laughing, and everything in between. It is beautiful and hard. And this is what Bowler explores on her podcast “Everything Happens.” Bowler interviews lots of interesting, insightful people, and talks with them about what life looks like in the “after.” Once we know that “life is so beautiful” and “life is so hard” — once we know that everything happens — what does it look like to live with that knowledge? If these are questions you're wrestling with, we'd recommend:
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