The Phone Call at 3 AM

On March 17, 2019, Sarah Chen walked into Harborview Medical Center in Seattle expecting to say goodbye. Her seventeen-year-old son, Marcus, had been in a catastrophic car accident on Interstate 5. The doctors had used words like "incompatible" and "irreversible." She drove to the hospital the way the women walked to that tomb — carrying the weight of finality, rehearsing how to survive what comes after.

But when she pushed open the door to the ICU, Marcus was sitting up. Eyes open. Asking for water. The neurosurgeon stood in the corner, visibly shaken, saying he had no clinical explanation. Sarah's knees buckled — not from grief, but from a joy so fierce her body didn't know how to hold it.

She later told her pastor, "I went to that room to hold a dead boy's hand. I never imagined he'd squeeze back."

That is Matthew 28. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary walked to a sealed grave at dawn, carrying spices for a corpse. They had no expectation except sorrow. But the stone was already rolled away, and an angel spoke the most disruptive sentence in human history: "He is not here; He has risen."

Every Easter morning, God meets us in the place we expect only death — and gives us back what we never dared hope for. The tomb is empty. He squeezes back.