Mar 23, 2008

Happy Easter everybody. I was listening to Glenn Beck Friday on the radio (for those of you who don't know, he is an LDS political talk show guy http://www.glennbeck.com/) and he was telling the story of the cruxifiction of Jesus overlayed with a Pink Floyd song (don't worry, it was tastefully done). Glenn made a comment about how hard it must have been to describe the scene of His crucifixtion as noted in the four gospels of the New Testament that write only, "and they crucified him." The thought of trying to write about that event brought a sudden, and unexpected, burst of tears to my eyes. I can't imagine being responsible for the task of recording such a terrible event. Anyway, I just wanted to copy some of Glenn's transcript that day since it's Easter and I think it was a powerful message.

"I can't get into detail because it's personal in my family, but this has been one of the hardest years for me. This has been a very difficult year for me and my family and many nights in the last two months have not ended until 2:00 in the morning with my family around the kitchen table. And just this week one of my children said something, as all teenagers do, that was hurtful and I said, you know what, this stops, this stops and this stops right here until you figure out what to do with what just happened.

Well, it took her a few days but she came to me and in about 20 minutes she hemmed and hawed and I didn't say a word. I just let her talk. And she did everything but say 'I'm sorry,' but I knew she wanted to and I knew if I just shut up long enough, she would say it, and she did. Took 20 minutes. She finally stopped and she said, 'I'm really sorry, Dad.' I got up and hugged her and she immediately burst out into tears. And what was so shocking to me was her response. As she was crying, she said, 'It can't be this easy.' I said, 'Honey, you've made it so hard. It hasn't been easy, but it is this easy.' In all of life, all it requires is recognizing the problem, recognizing the pain, recognizing the frustration, working through it. And as you make mistakes along the way just stopping and honestly saying, 'I'm sorry.' And that's really what Easter is all about, much more important than Christmas. That's about the birth. But if it didn't happen, what happened this weekend, if that didn't happen, the birth would just be another baby. It's about the death and about the resurrection and about what that means, and what that means is, oh, my gosh, it's so easy. We make it so tough. We make it so hard. We wallow in our pain or we ignore our pain when all we have to really do is just sincerely say, 'I'm sorry,' really mean it and it all goes away."

Here is an interview where Glenn tells his conversion story: