At this point, Easter seems far away (although one of my neighbors gave his children an Easter egg hunt today!).  Messiah isn't played anymore; the special food is gone; church services resume their normality; people have returned to their daily responsibilities.  The glory of the day seems gone.
     For the very earliest Christians, the eleven (absent Judas) apostles and their immediate followers, the resurrection's wonder never left them.  It was literally all they could talk about.  They remained amazed, totally amazed, that though Jesus died, he came back:  he lived again.  Jesus' resurrection confirmed everything they understood about the message of their scriptures.  It validated all that, over the many centuries of Israel's existence, God had promised.  In Jesus' rising, death, that universal scourge of every human being, they realized, was over.
     Nonetheless, in the heat of existence, on the days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the exigencies of being alive, remembering this message becomes difficult.  We may feel as if we are like people who, as Virginia Woolf observed in her "Lives of the Obscure," are "advancing with lights in the growing gloom," heading toward obscurity, the obscurity of a life lived, a life enjoyed immensely but a life one day to end and be gone, never to return.  Believing in eternal life is hard in the morass of the material present.  We cannot see it, so why put our trust in it?
     As Irish poet William Yeats reminds us, however, "And God stands winding his lonely horn, and time and the world are ever in flight."  Though time wears on and the years drag by, unyielding and unchanging, God remains.  Resurrection continues.
     It's hard to see the end of a road at its beginning, yes, but the resurrection tells us that despite everything we might see, there is a road to follow.
     And there's a destiny at its end.
     Have a great day.