I am wrestling with the meaning of Easter

Millions of people across the world are celebrating Easter.  After a week of prayer and of reflecting on the death of Christ on our behalf, we wake up on Sunday morning and celebrate His resurrection.   The Easter story is well known to us.  This year I have been wrestling with it’s meaning.  Not the theology, not the part about the separation from God and His death in our stead.  These I have accepted and embraced from my early teenage years.I have been struggling with the application.  Let me explain.

The death and resurrection of Christ brings forgiveness, reconciliation and new beginnings.  We readily accept these for ourselves - as we should.  They are freely given and impossible to earn.If this is true, and it is, then why do we not readily extend these same graces to people around us?   Why do others have to earn our forgiveness?  Why do people have to provide penance of some sort to be reconciled to us?  And if we do forgive and reconcile, why do we secretly hold past wrongs against them, pushing them slightly away, not truly allowing new beginnings?Jesus is resurrected.  If you have accepted this, the very same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you.  The power to forgive others, to be reconciled with them and to start all over as if the past had not happened is available to you.God, the sinless Perfect One has extended to us grace for our sin against Him.  This grace, this sweet and precious grace, this amazing and powerful grace, is available to us.  It is available to us not only to use on ourselves but  to extend to others.  Freely it has been given to us.  Freely we need to give.This Easter, along with me,  will you:Forgive that person?  Truly forgive.Will you be reconciled? Truly embrace.Will you start again?  Truly new.And when you have done this, will you do it again, and again?  His mercy is new every morning, as should be ours.Today, may the meaning of Easter truly be yours.  Have a blessed day.“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”  Romans 8:11