Because He Lives

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow
Because he lives, all fear is gone
Because I know, I know He holds the future
And life is worth the living, just because He lives.

Sometimes little choruses like this bug me because they strike me as trite. Other times, like yesterday when I read this one on the IM profile of a friend of mine, I sit dumbfounded because of the beautiful simplicity they express. The last line especially jumped out at me - life is worth the living, because He lives. Christ's resurrection power lives in me. A simple, profound truth that I don't connect to often enough. I sit here and internally go through the junk that fills the closets of my heart...categorize and label my fears for the future...question just what it is I have to live for...and in so doing, live a waking sleep, oblivious to the most important fact of my existence: that Christ lives. There's a deeper question that haunts me. Have I become so, I don't know, put out with Christianese bullshit tradition that I let truth slide out the window alongside the junk that I'm deliberately tossing? A truth as simple as, Jesus lives? Have I seen a truth like this applied too many times as a Band-Aid cure-all, applied dispassionately and sometimes even abusively to hurting people, so much so that when I hear it, I am filled with the stories of cold people who have been told "be warm"; hungry people who have been told "be filled", grieving people who have been told "go in hope" - all because "Jesus lives" - and yet the church will do nothing to actually warm, fill, or grant hope?

And yet there's still the moment of surprise when the truth - not the words - gets behind my cynicism and pierces the wall I have up towards churchianity. Maybe it's not as difficult as I make it sometimes....