When he opened the bedroom door and looked at me, I knew he didn’t have good news.
“I received the email,” he sighed. “They chose an internal candidate.”
This time, the disappointment was a bit deeper. The job fit my husband like a glove, and his resume was outstanding. We both firmly believed it was a home run.
As disappointment set in, my mind started racing. The pressures of the past many months began weighing me down.
When Jan. 1 arrived, I had a planner filled with goals for the year, broken down into projects and beautifully organized into tasks, timelines and rewards for accomplishing each goal.
The goals included writing another book, launching courses and expanding my ministry’s outreach in two countries.
And then it happened — one push on the first domino, and every piece started falling: a parent’s sickness, a job loss, sleepless nights, stressful days juggling life between two cities and, finally, the sting of death.
And then, almost unnoticed, Easter arrived — a quiet punctuation mark in a noisy, chaotic chapter. The four months since Christmas felt like a decade. Once filled with tasks and checkmarks, my planner sat at my desk open to the third week of January, frozen in time — a snapshot of hope before everything shifted.
I was driving home from an appointment the week after Easter, the radio playing softly in the background while my mind wandered in a dozen directions. Then something the host said pierced through the noise — he was sharing about his children’s Easter egg hunt and laughing about the simple joys of the holiday.
And just like that, it hit me. Easter had come and gone … and I had barely noticed.
And then this thought grabbed my heart: If we’re already angst-filled and smothered by responsibilities, routines and the troubles that surround life only days after the observance of Easter, could it be that we’ve missed the point of Jesus’ resurrection altogether?
Maybe what we truly need to do is keep reading the story, the days after Resurrection Sunday.
If you flip a few pages from the end of the Gospels into Acts, you’ll discover that by verse 9 of chapter one, Jesus is not only resurrected — he’s ascended into heaven, where he (as Paul later writes in his letters to the Colossians) is “seated at the right hand of God.”
His positioning is significant. In ancient times, sitting at the right hand of a king signified authority — it meant the person shared in the ruler’s power, honor and status.
By ascending to the right hand of God, Jesus isn’t just risen — he reigns. That place of honor marks him as ruler over all creation, exalted above every name and every circumstance.
The Jesus who walked the dusty roads, wept and suffered for our sake is now the risen and exalted King. As the apostle John writes in Revelation, he is declared the “King of kings and Lord of lords!”
It’s a shift in authority — and that shift should also realign our perspective. If we claim to belong to the resurrected Christ, we should also trust that he is Lord over everything that affects us. That means when stress builds, emotions escalate and obligations threaten to overwhelm us, we’re not helpless, nor do we have to default to using our own (limited) power to “do the best we can.”
In chapter one of his first letter, the apostle Peter emphasizes our new position: “In his great mercy (God) has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
This verse links our confidence in life to the certainty of Christ’s triumph over death and the grave.
The New Testament’s hope goes beyond wanting circumstances to turn out our way. Even if things don’t change — or get worse — we can remain confident that our living Lord reigns and is working on our behalf. Our hope is not anchored in circumstances but in who Jesus is — our victorious king!
Indeed, while the calendar may say Easter has passed, the impact of this pivotal event should never fade for believers.
He IS risen, and he reigns.
May that truth anchor our hearts — not just at Easter, but every single day.
Patricia Holbrook is a columnist, international author, and speaker. Visit her website: www.PatriciaHolbrook.com and her podcast God-Sized Stories with Patricia Holbrook. For speaking engagements and comments, email patricia@PatriciaHolbrook.com
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