Easter Sunday, Panama

I’ve been awake since 3am.

The rooster outside our tent has opinions, and he needs the entire jungle to know them. He’s been in a very committed long-distance conversation with a fellow cockadoodledooer from some many villages away — back and forth, back and forth, into the wee hours of the night. I lay there listening, equal parts annoyed and unwilling to move, because moving would mean unzipping, and unzipping would mean facing whatever is outside this tent in the dark.

I will not face the dark.

Not after my husband killed a spider the size of a small country on the side of our temporary housing last night, right before we climbed in. I can still see its insides splattered on my “roof.” So I lay there, willing myself not to need the bathroom. Stubbornness as self-preservation. I will not have another Philippines tragedy on my hands — and that, friends, is a story for another day.

It was John, a fellow traveler, who reminded me at 7am: “Happy Easter.”

I’d forgotten. On some level I hadn’t — I’d packed Easter baskets for all the kids before we left, Joe had prepared sermons to preach to the unreached, and our house host had even sewn me a gorgeous new yellow Easter dress. That dress made me sentimental in the way only a mother understands. The girls and I always get new Easter dresses. Always. And I found myself wondering — when was the last time we went shopping for Easter dresses the way it used to be done? The way your grandma took you? When did that stop?

I digress.

I had not planned to be separated from Joe today. These Panama trips, we call them our honeymoons — just us, together, expanding the Kingdom. But I woke up yesterday a little sick, and today was a 12-mile round trip to the third bridge site, in the rain, and my husband looked at me and told me I had to stay home.

So I stayed.

The WiFi battery beeped at me aggressively and then went dead right in the middle of texting the kids — five minutes to tell them about their Easter baskets, tell our moms we love them, and then silence.

And there it was. The ache.

My oldest, going to church alone. My youngest and her boyfriend at their new church. Me here, in a tent, in Panama, eating peanut butter crackers in the rain. First Easter away from them in their 22 and 20 years of life.

Did you know that last Easter was the last Easter you’d all be together?

I never know. That’s the thing. I want to search my memory for the last time I took my little girls shopping for an Easter dress. I ache to remember it clearly. I want to remember the last time my mom and grandma took me shopping for that dress, or any dress. The moment I cannot pinpoint.

Younger friends becoming parents would always ask me for one piece of advice, and I would never failingly say anything other than this: “You never know when the last time is the last time.”

I said it so many times. And here I am, living inside the very truth of it.

I ache for the days of surprise Easter baskets. Pretty little dresses. Church together. A honey baked ham for Sophia, my broccoli casserole for Boo. Egg hunts. Praising Jesus in the same room.

But.

While I sit here in my zipped-up tent, listening to rain and birds and feeling a little sorry for myself over peanut butter crackers, something redirects me.

He is Risen.

He is why we are here. This is His will — expanding His Kingdom at the expense of our comfort, our family rhythms, our Easter dresses and Sunday ham. And He meets me here, in the tent, with my aching mama heart, and reorients everything.

Sophia was right, as she often is: everyone is loved. And now the people of the Comarca can feel that love too.

So today I am grateful — grateful we haven’t eaten the 3am alarm clock, grateful for a long nap ahead, grateful for sunshine prayers so the battery charges and I receive pictures of my babies tonight. I’ll journal and read and work and pray and try not to punish myself for not knowing the last time was the last time. (And truthfully, I’m sure it wasn’t but still…)

Because He is Risen.

Even here. Even in the rain. Even in a tent with a splattered spider on the ceiling.

He is Risen indeed.

“Hope is not the same as optimism. Hope is the ability to trust that God is working even when we can’t see it.”

- Marva Dawn, Unfettered Hope