This is me and my dad circa 1987 when I was 9 years old. We had gone that day to a friend’s farm to see his new baby calves. I remember feeling equal parts terror and delight as we fed those giant baby cows with giant baby bottles. It left a mark on this city girl. 

But how about those high tops I’m wearing? That’s all I can see. 

On yesterday’s #allthingspodcast I shared about how my mom and I started attending church when I was about this age. I marvel now when I think about it. I was a little girl walking through the trauma of divorce and the turbulence of two homes. There’s no human reason I should be included in the family of God. And yet God saw my mom and he saw me and he made a way to welcome us in. He led my mom to a sweet, Christ-centered church that taught me all about Jesus’s compassion and mercy, his life, death, and resurrection, and that he’s coming again. By God’s grace alone, I believed. 

My dad, ever the skeptic and an attorney, did not love this news. Every other week I lived with him and every other week he questioned what I was hearing and why I believed. I get it. He didn’t want to see his little girl believe a lie or fall prey to a group of extremists. His interrogations were from a good place and I love him for his concern. 

And really, that concern was a gift. I wanted to please my dad. I didn’t want him to think I was blindly gullible. It drove me to study—through high school, college, and even now—the historical claims of Christ. If Jesus, a man claiming to be God, truly rose from the dead, I wanted to know that for certain, even if it meant going against the warnings and wishes of my own father. 

What Christians celebrate at Easter is nothing short of miraculous. But our faith is founded on substantial historical, archaeological, and textual evidence. It’s not a blind faith by any means. My greatest desire is that anyone who does not yet believe, would take Christ’s claims seriously enough to do some investigating and see what you find (yesterday’s All Things and all the show notes are a good place to start!). 

He is Risen. He is Risen indeed.