Easter Bunnies and Eternity

I was standing in the produce aisle at Kroger's today, and a woman wearing bunny ears and with whiskers painted on her face hurried by and said to me, "Do you know anything about asparagus?"
I saw she was wearing a Kroger's nametag and figured out later (when she checked out my groceries!) she was a customer service clerk.
"Uh, I always try to buy the thin stems," I said. (A rule of life: If someone asks you a question, your great tendency is to assume you know the answer. This tendency should often be resisted.)
"That sounds good," she said and grabbed a bunch before hopping, I mean hurrying, away.
The store was crowded today. Lots of pre-Easter shopping going on. A woman in the candy aisle was on her cell phone asking someone (her daughter? her neighbor?) what kind of sweets to buy for the Easter baskets. I came upon this display and couldn't resist snapping it.
As I navigated my cart through the crowded aisles, I thought about the PBS special we had recorded and got around to watching this week. Part of the American Experience series, it was a two-hour documentary on the Amish. Part of their rationale for staying separate from the "Gentiles" is their effort to focus on God and not get too attached to this world. Their goal is to escape American consumerism, a thought that too seldom occurs to too few of us--me included.
One young Amish father said he asked a group of tourists (millions visit Amish sites every year), "How many of you have a television in your house?" Every hand went up. "How many of you worry that the television isn't good for you family?" Slowly, a majority answered this one yes too. "How many of you will get rid of your television to protect your family?" Not one hand went up.
"But we would do anything to protect our families," he said. "We would remove anything that threatened our family."
Another Amish man was pondering life and death and life's difficulties. "Our lives are just a speck of sand in the vast expanse of eternity," he said.
"Most of us don't think that way," my friend Bill Weber said when we visited yesterday.
"Most Americans certainly don't," I agreed. "Including many American Christians." Including, too often, me.
Hopefully tomorrow we'll be able to grasp the wonder of the fact that the God of eternity and the Creator of the universe was willing to inhabit one of those specks of sand, just so the rest of us could know him.
Ah, tomorrow we'll enjoy some Easter ham and Easter candy and, who knows, maybe even some asparagus. But hopefully we'll also glimpse at least a glimmer of eternity. That promise is the reason we celebrate.