I don't say much about my college experience.  It simply wasn't that good.  Nor was it particularly fun - with the occasional exception.  Like the spring of my junior year.  The administration decided to have a college-wide Easter egg hunt.  The faculty were given literally thousands of eggs to hide on the campus and the students were set loose to find them.  But here's what made it cool.  All the eggs had a prize value according to their color.  For example, a blue egg might be worth 25 cents, a pink egg 50 cents and a yellow egg a dollar.  So whatever eggs we found we could exchange for cash.  (Sounds quite generous, doesn't it?  But I think it might have been my tuition money that was funding this big-kids egg hunt.  Hmm.)

Anyhow, the morning of the egg hunt came and we all had our strategies planned, including my foster brother, who attended the same college I did, and who figured there would be some equivalent of "the golden egg" hidden on the island in the middle of the campus lake (see the above picture of the campus). Back in the day there was no walkway to the island; it could only be reached by boat. But alas, the egg hunt was pretty early in spring so the boats weren't out yet. But this was not an issue to my brother - he just swam out to the island in like 40-degree temperatures to claim the imagined egg. His reward? He got wet - and very cold. And remained poor. There was no golden egg. Me? I stayed dry and still managed to find like $43 worth of eggs!

Egg hunts are an important (or at least a fun) part of Easter. We have always had egg hunts for our kids while growing up (we did learn at some point to only hide plastic eggs in the house just in case one of them does not get found until weeks later - yeah, we learned that one the hard way!). It was always a lot of fun - searching for the eggs.

I have no idea how the whole egg hunt thing got started, and for some reason I have a hard time connecting that tradition with the Easter bunny - and for that matter connecting the Easter Bunny with the whole idea of Easter - but then I'm drifting away from the point of this post.

I simply want to focus on the idea of the search.

Easter is all about the search! It's about the women searching for the body of Jesus. It's about the disciples searching for just what the empty tomb was about. It's about us searching for the real meaning of Easter. But most of all it's about a God who comes searching for us - the ones lost in our sin and without hope in this world.

Luke put it this way in his gospel:

"For the Son of Man came to seek for and to save what was lost."

What was lost?  We were.  And with no hope of finding ourselves.  But Jesus came looking for us - and found us.  And with incredible grace claimed us as his own!  I'm grateful for the search!