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For as long as I can remember, the Easter season has always been precious and special.
I understood even as a young child what Easter symbolized, but what made it even more special was how my grandmother taught me about it when I was five.

My grandmother, who I called Granny, was an avid gardener. She loved all kinds of flowers, and she had a garden behind our house that was half of our property in size. My family’s property line encompassed Fourth Street (now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) to Mitchell Lane. In our front yard she grew all kinds of beautiful flowers, tall growths of what Granny called ribbon grass in the center of the yard, and hedge bushes and shrubbery on the perimeter. In her garden she grew peach and fig trees and at least 10 kinds of vegetables.

One day when I was five, I went outside to play one cold late November morning only to find all the beautiful plants were gone. They had frozen overnight and were limp and brown. I ran into the house to get my grandmother. “Somebody’s killed your flowers!” I cried. My grandmother quickly put her coat on and walked me outside. We surveyed the garden and like the flowers in the front yard, the lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, everything in the garden was limp, frozen and lifeless. I started crying because I wanted everything to be like it was the day before, full of life and beauty. “You just wait until spring, especially at around Easter time, you gone see what the Resurrection was all about” she said. “You mean like Jesus’ resurrection” I asked? I knew the word resurrection from Sunday School. “I know Jesus came back from the dead I said, but what’s that got to do with your dead flowers? It’s so sad out here.” “You just wait and see Granny said.”

As children often do, I forgot about that incident until one March day when Granny called me into the front yard. There were the first daffodils, crocuses and hyacinth of the spring. “See I told you” she said, “this is what Jesus’ resurrection is all about. New life comes from nature even though things looked dead through the winter. God brings believers in Jesus a new eternal life through Jesus Christ. He can use springtime to show us new life, kind of like how He brought new life to yard with these new flowers.
Easter is about the resurrection of Jesus being raised from the dead. He died for our sins and as He forgives us, we grow into a new life too. But these flowers are just for a season. These flowers will die off again come winter, and hopefully they’ll be back next spring. But when Jesus Christ gives us new life, it’s a beautiful everlasting life in Him. You just remember that Missy” she said.

Many, many decades later, as my family and I were preparing the now vacant lot on our family’s property, to become a history park, you can’t image my joy when I found a small patch of daffodils my grandmother had planted decades ago. It brought back the story she told me at age five.

Truly great is God’s faithfulness to us all. This Resurrection (Easter) season, may the joy that Jesus Christ can bring into your life, bring you new life in Him. May you come know that He can bring new life, light, joy, beauty, peace and hope to any bleak or sad season in life. He is faithful to do it. Great is His faithfulness.
Have a blessed and beautiful Easter season.

Leesa Jones is a Washington native and the co-curator of the Washington Waterfront Underground Railroad Museum.