Devotion 301 - lucky

It’s the stuff little girl’s dreams are made of...

I was just four.  It was Easter.  Like every other Easter we had traveled south.  Sometimes to Grandma’s and sometimes to the lake.

Every year my mother and my aunts would disappear to the Big K and every year just hours after their disappearance the Easter Bunny would arrive.  

I never connected the two events; I just always remember the Bunny’s timing was impeccable.  There would be candy, lots of candy.  There would be cousin fun and then on Sunday, all of us would head to church.  

If we found ourselves at the Lake we would head out at Sunrise and my uncle would lead the prayer.  Somewhere in the midst of all the sugar and plastic, we knew what this weekend was about. 

It was the Easter I was four.  All the kids loaded up in the truck, if I recall it might have been the back of the pickup and we all unloaded at the church.  No homemade hunt would do this year.  The church was sponsoring the festivities.  We all lined up, armed with our baskets and bags.  I had no idea there was a grand prize, being the youngest of the cousins, I just wanted to do what they were doing.  It was glorious. 

 Daddy insisted on staying with me.  He pointed me here and there and I gathered up eggs with wild abandon.  We got to the hedgerow and he pointed again.  I saw the egg under the bush and then shot a glance to daddy.  He smiled big.  There in the hedge stood a blue stuffed bunny.  

I didn't know it was the grand prize.  I just knew it was mine.  We carefully took him out of the tangled branches and ran back to the starting line.  Everyone cheered, including my very competitive, older brother.  I had won the Grand Prize and all my cousins rejoiced, “You are so lucky!!”  

They screamed.  I remember inhaling the winds of victory.

It had been at least a dozen years since I thought of that Easter weekend so long ago while dining with friends at an Asian restaurant. The waitress looked at my baby daughter, my 4- year old and with tears in her eyes said, “She is so lucky!!”

I don’t think of her as lucky.  I was there that day.  The day that a tiny two-year old girl had to say goodbye to everything she knew from her orphanage and hello to people that didn't look, nor talk nor smell like her.  It was not luck.

The waitress in her broken English reminded me, reminded us all what life is like in her and my daughter’s home country for children with no parents and children that have some physical anomaly.  I shook my head with a yes wishing somehow luck was not the label she had chosen for our story.

Easter bunnies are lucky.  Adoption is not.

We left the restaurant and the word would not leave my mind. 

I prayed wishing I had had more eloquent words with the waitress.  Somewhere under that label stands a truth I hope our waitress knows and wish I lived every day.  

Somehow when you peel back that label there stands the truth that our Savior died and resurrected not so we would be “lucky” but so He could prove His amazing, arresting, incomprehensible LOVE.

You see I forget about that lucky bunny day some forty plus years ago, and there are more days than I care to count that I forget I am extraordinarily loved. 

I forget that in the crazy chaos that is life, there is one amazing blessing over me.  I, you, WE have a Savior that has already written the end of the story.  

Not only that, He is there for every word, every sentence, every chapter, saying, “you are my blessed child.  I found you. I tore you out of the mire that is your life to show you the sunshine.  I will hold the umbrella for your tears and I will make sure the pain you feel is the pain I carry.  I won’t let you hunt for life alone.  I will direct you.  I will point for you.  I will make sure every blessing I hold for you is revealed as long as you keep looking.  When bad happens it is not because we've stopped walking, it’s because I want to carry you…let me.” 

Lucky?  Ava, I, you? I don’t think so!

Yes the world can paint that sweet picture of luck but the Father has so much more.  He doesn't deal in fairy tales; He deals in the paints of blessings and the masterpieces of the eternal.

He brings us to Him.  He invites us in with this crazy tugging at the heart that says there is so much more.  “Come, inhale, there is victory in loving Me.”  And we do and we breathe and we are unmistakably home.

He is writing a story, and we stand in the privileged seat to write, read and finish it with the Author.

For we are God's masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Eph 2:10