An Easter to remember

Tom Pinney

Easter tends to be looked at as the Super Bowl of the Christian tradition.

Think about it – the Super Bowl packs a stadium and draws millions to their TVs to watch, there’s a ton of pomp and circumstance as the players come out, the players wear different uniforms, and the entire game feels special, even if there’s nothing inherently special about what’s going on.

Hear me out, because I feel like you’re going to get offended with where I go here, but Easter is very similar.

Millions turn up at churches who hadn’t been there since last Easter, making it the highest-attended church service of the year. There’s a ton of pomp and circumstance, from breakfasts to egg hunts to special Scripture readings. The entire service feels special, even though communion is still served and, in most cases, most of the songs you’ll do are songs you’ll do throughout the year.

Most will even trade their usual Sunday fare for suits and dresses. Special uniforms.

I hate that this is a thing, but this is American Christianity in a nutshell. We’re getting to a point where an increasing number of people who call themselves Christians only show up for the Big Game, and I think it’s indicative of how society is beginning to view Christianity as a whole.

Today’s Christians often forget that God works very real miracles, even today, and they forget what that feels like. They’ve traded in their “faith” for a set of ideal living principles, and on Easter Sunday, they come in and take a seat in front of a cross which stands not for the sacrifice Christ gave there, but for an obligation to show up.

Christianity shouldn’t be relegated to the principles by which we’re supposed to live, but by the stories we get to tell of God’s grace and faithfulness to those who are faithful to Him. And let me tell you, my family has stories of these in abundance.

My grandfather walks with no right hip, for instance. He literally doesn’t have a right hip; he had hip cancer in the 70s, got a replacement hip, which then developed cancer as well, and he was told he would be wheelchair bound for the rest of his life because he didn’t want them to replace the hip again.

He’s also had two other types of cancer, and he’s been given the prognosis of “six months or fewer” about 25 times in his life. For perspective, he was last given that prognosis 11 years ago. His doctors are befuddled.

My immediate family shouldn’t exist as it does, because when my dad was in high school, he had a small bout with spinal meningitis. In the 1980s, it killed 90 percent of patients. In the four years I was at OU, it killed five people. My dad survived because, as he tells it, he had a dream while in the coma where he stood in a line of people, and one by one, a hand from the sky pointed at the people and they disappeared.

But when the hand got to him, a voice said, “Not yet.” And he woke up.

Four years ago, he landed in the hospital again with a fun case of septicemia and gangrene, and over the course of about two weeks, his prognosis went from “He’ll leave in a casket” to “Go home, Mr. Pinney, you’re cured.”

I was born dead. My younger brother was born with a collapsed lung, and he gets “randomly selected” at airports because he has a rock attached to his femoral artery from a fall he took on a gravel driveway when he was four years old.

But on Easter, 16 years ago, we got one of the coolest stories of God’s faithfulness of all, when my baby sister, then five years old, took a tumble from a two-story window onto a bed of rocks. I’m going to try to describe it, but sometimes words fail. You really had to be there to see it.

It was El Paso, Texas, and my sister’s window sat around 20 feet directly above the backyard fence, which was a rock wall with an iron gate for access. And not just an iron gate; the type with spikes that stick straight up.

Physics says my sister shouldn’t be alive because of the fall she took. But God laughed at mere physics and said, “Watch this.”

As my sister tells the story, there was an angel that appeared just as she knew she was going to fall, and the angel said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.” The angel then pushed her against the outer wall of the house beside the window, and she fell to the ground and landed on the gravel which decorated our yard about six feet away from the gate which should have claimed her.

A few days later, we went to the outer wall of the house, which corroborated her story, as a streak of blood was found about three feet to the right of the window, right where it shouldn’t have been.

For ten years, the remnants of the crescent-shaped scar adorned my sister’s face, and every time she got asked about it, she got to tell a really, really cool story.

If you only go to church on Easter, I’m going to encourage you to go to church this weekend as well. Easter is just the Super Bowl.

But like with football, awesome things happen throughout the regular season.

Kam Chancellor leap-frogging a center to block a field goal. Odell Becham, Jr.’s amazing one-handed leaping catch for a touchdown while being fouled by Brandon Carr. Tony Romo’s impressive fourth-quarter comebacks. All of that happened during the regular season.

In much the same way, Christianity exists before and after Easter. God moves in His house all year long.

You just have to be there to see it.

Tom Pinney is a news reporter for the Maryville Daily Forum