Does prayer change things? Or us? Or both?

I couldn’t go back to sleep. Now that I’m well into middle age, it seems to happen more often: I awaken at 2 or 3 am and lay in bed wide awake for an hour, my mind instantly alert and working over the day’s triumphs or disappointments.

When it happened again a few early mornings ago, I found myself thinking hard about Easter. And not just thinking, but puzzling. Why don’t I make more of this holy season that intends to rivet us with the good news of Jesus’ resurrection?

Of course, Easter Sunday came and went almost two weeks ago. You might wonder why I haven’t, church season-wise, moved on. But in my denominational tradition, we say that we still live squarely in the Easter season. Just as there are forty days in Lent, we celebrate Easter for fifty.

Still, it began to strike me as curious that I and the church people I hang around have seemed more aware of Lent and its penitential heaviness than they now are of Easter with its resurrection delight. We adopt Lenten disciplines—forgoing caffeine or candy, or fasting once a week, or adding a weekly act of volunteer service. But now that Easter has ushered in the season of freshness and life, why do I not set up camp in the foothills of resurrection joy? And getting more practical: Why not adopt a regular Easter practice with every bit of the devotion of a Lenten discipline?

So my pre-dawn wrestling lately has me asking myself, sometimes smack in the middle of what someone called "life’s grubby particulars," What does it mean for my life that Jesus was raised from the dead? In what ways do I (and can I) follow what a poem of Wendell Berry urged: "Practice resurrection"? (The phrase suggests that it might indeed take "practice.")

Other ages have lived more vividly in this reality, it seems. The early church’s apostolic witness Paul wrote of the power that raised Jesus from death as a reality for the present moment. He called it "the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead" (Ephesians 1:19-20). The power that made Jesus alive and risen works in and "toward" us? No wonder one morning I found myself too excited to go right back to sleep in the early hours of day.

So I’m asking myself again: What difference does Jesus’ resurrection make? What could it look like now that I know that the risen Lord resides in our world? What might be done to make that remarkable reality more present when morning comes again?