What’s your favourite Christian Holiday?  Some like Christmas with all the glitz and glamour of the lights and others love Easter for the Easter egg hunts and all those hot cross buns which are very tasty delights indeed. However for me I like to stick to the basics, Christmas the birth of Christ and the fulfilment of the promise and Easter the death of Christ and our Salvation and Restoration of the covenant between man and his God. Easter is most definitely my most beloved. Why you ask? Let me take you on a little personal journey.

About 10 years ago, my husband and i were blessed with a baby boy. The pregnancy was not difficult at all. I developed a deep love for fruits and they constituted a good 90% of my diet. Meat, not so much. I didn't even have back aches and enjoyed walking and exercising a lot. Our son decided to make his grand entrance into the world 2 months early. I kid you not, neither one of us was ready for the joys of parenthood. I don't remember most of the first few weeks because I was so ill that my husband had to bath and feed me and take care of our son too. It was only when he was six to seven weeks that I slowly began to gain my lucidity and ease into being a mother. However, God had other plans. The weekend after our son’s six weeks check-up, he passed away. He was 7 weeks, 3 days, 11 hours and 58 minutes old. It also happened to be my husband’s first day at a job we had prayed for close to a year. Finally I was conscious and our first born son dies. I was singing him a lullaby and rocking my son to sleep without knowing I was actually ushering him to his eternal sleep. I remember my prayer at that time was “Please God take me and not my son. Anything but my son.” I didn’t have the power to give life back so I helplessly felt my son turn cold. At that precise moment, if I had been given the choice of either saving my son’s life or watching the world burn I would have let it burn down to a smoking cinder in a heartbeat. Losing a child is pain that no parent should ever have to endure.

Now imagine what was running through Gods mind when He watched the humans, his much loved creations, whipping and lashing His only son. Spiting on him and humiliating him with what seemed to be no end and yet He is the Almighty and omnipotent God. He let all that happen because of US. When i watched the 2004 Mel Gibson helmed film “The Passion of the Christ”, the sheer brutality and viciousness of the treatment Jesus Christ suffered, left me with an profound sense of guilt for my transgressions. Later I learned that I was not the only one that the depiction of Jesus’ final hours had a powerful effect on. In Texas back in January 2004, Dan Leach strangled his then girlfriend Ashley Nicole Wilson, 19, because he did not want the child she was carrying. He then forged a suicide note and staged the scene to make it look like she had taken her own life. Police believed the ruse and ruled it a suicide. After watching “The Passion” however, Dan confessed to her murder. The movie was visceral and heart breaking to watch and it made you question why God would allow this to happen. “You are GOD just stop it.” Yes you are right HE is GOD.  He did it for you. If you cannot relate to the loss of a loved one you are blessed. Especially if it is a child you are truly blessed.  Having experienced it I can safely say we underrate the sacrificial giving God did for us. The human dynamics of sacrificing a son are mind boggling and yet the “I am that I am” did it for us.