The Phone Call at Gate B7

On March 11, 2011, Takeshi Kanno drove to the coast of Sendai, Japan, three days after the tsunami had swallowed his neighborhood whole. He went to collect whatever fragments remained of his mother's house — a photograph, maybe a teacup, some small relic to bury in place of a body. He had already written her name on the family's list of the dead. His sister had already chosen flowers for the memorial.

He parked where the street used to be and walked through silence so heavy it pressed against his chest. Then his phone rang. A nurse at an evacuation shelter forty miles inland spoke his mother's name. She was alive. She had been carried by the water nearly a mile and pulled from the wreckage by strangers. She was asking for him.

Takeshi fell to his knees in the mud and wept — not the grief he had prepared for, but something so much larger he had no name for it.

This is the earthquake of Easter morning. The women in Matthew 28 walked to a grave carrying burial spices and heavy hearts. They had prepared for death. Instead, an angel said the most disorienting words in human history: "He is not here; He has risen." Then Jesus Himself met them on the road, alive and speaking their names. They had come to honor a body. They found instead the Lord of Life. The Almighty does not leave His people to kneel in the rubble of death. He meets them on the road with news too wonderful to contain.