The Life We Find

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”

—Luke 24:5–6 

Easter morning does not begin with celebration. It begins in grief.

Before the alleluias ring out, before the lilies bloom in sanctuaries, before anyone dares to proclaim resurrection, there is a quiet, aching moment at a tomb. The women come carrying spices, prepared for death, expecting loss, bracing themselves for the finality of what has been taken from them.

They are not looking for a miracle. They are looking for a body.

And instead, they are met with a question—one that feels almost too sudden, too jarring for their sorrow: Why are you looking for the living among the dead? It is a question that does not just belong to that morning. It echoes.

It echoes into our lives, into our searching, into the quiet places where we have learned—sometimes without even realizing it—to expect absence instead of life.

Because so many of us, especially those of us who are LGBTQ+ and holding onto faith, know what it is to go looking for life in places that have only ever offered us something else. We have sat in spaces where love came with conditions. We have listened to teachings that asked us to shrink, to silence ourselves, to divide our souls in order to belong. We have been told, directly or indirectly, that in order to be loved by God, something within us had to be buried.

And so, we learned to search carefully. Quietly. Hopefully. We went looking for life in places that asked us to die. But Easter interrupts that pattern.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not only about what happens after death—it is about where life has been all along, and where it cannot be contained. It is the undoing of every assumption that death gets the final word. It is the quiet but undeniable truth that life refuses to stay buried, that love cannot be sealed behind stone, that God is never found in anything that diminishes the divine image within you.

The tomb is empty.

And that means something more than we often let ourselves feel.

It means that love cannot be locked away. It means that truth cannot be buried. And it means that neither can you.

If Palm Sunday held the sorrow of missed peace—the ache of what could have been—then Easter is its restoration. What was hidden is now revealed. What was rejected is raised. What seemed lost returns, not as it was, but transformed—radiant, undeniable, alive in a way that cannot be ignored.

And for those of us who have wrestled with the tension between faith and identity, Easter offers a truth that is both gentle and radical: You do not have to search for life in places that erase you. You do not have to keep returning to tombs that never held your resurrection.

Christ is already alive—present in the ways you love deeply, in the courage it takes to live honestly, in that quiet, sacred knowing that you were never a mistake to begin with. The life you have been seeking has not been withheld from you. It has been within you, waiting to be recognized, waiting to be named, waiting to rise.

So hear the question again—not as a rebuke, but as an invitation. Why are you looking for the living among the dead?

Let it draw you away from spaces that wound. Let it lead you toward places that honor your wholeness. Let it remind you that resurrection is not just something that happened once, long ago—it is something still unfolding, even now, within you.

Christ is risen.

And so, in ways both visible and hidden, are you.

“He’s alive and I’m forgiven, heaven’s gates are open wide.” — Dolly Parton, “He’s Alive”

✝️  ✝️  ✝️