Danielle Peterson

Happy Easter everyone!

I couldn’t let today pass by without taking a minute to celebrate the real reason for Easter.

Oftentimes in our American culture, Easter- like Christmas- can often be overshadowed by the commercialized and superficial reasons for the season.

When I was a kid, although we would always attend church meeting on Easter Sunday and hear wonderful and inspiring Easter messages, we didn’t do much else to really focus the Easter holiday around Christ and His atonement and resurrection.

While I do appreciate the church and gospel centered meetings of my childhood, as I’ve gotten older, I have found myself seeking more to really celebrate and honor the Easter holiday in a way that is more focused on the Savior instead of the Easter bunny.

I spend the week of Easter contemplating and studying what the Savior did each day in the week leading up to His death and resurrection. I’ve attended a hosted Last Supper dinner where scholars share and discuss the different traditional foods eaten at Passover and what they represent in relation to this magnanimous event in history. I’ve even thought about one day hosting my own Passover dinner with friends and family to honor Christ and remember Him.

But at the very least, this Easter Sunday, I wanted to just take a moment and honor my Savior and the sacrifices He made for me, and all of us with a simple testimony.

It amazes and humbles me that my Savior would suffer all of the pains, sicknesses, weakness and sins that I would experience in this life so that I wouldn’t have to carry them alone- so that I could give them over to Him and be freed from their burden in this life and the next.

It amazes me that He died and was resurrected- that He, being perfect, overcame the penultimate ending, breaking the bonds of death and making it so that we too could rise again; not just in the life to come, but every single day as we live our lives imperfectly.

I am so grateful for the sacrifice of my Savior, and the burden that He took for all of us, so that each and every day, as I struggle and stumble imperfectly along the path of discipleship, He can lift me up again; He can raise me out of sorrow and despair, out of sin, weaknesses, suffering, if I let Him.

This Easter Sunday, and always, I bear testimony that our Savior lives. And that because He lives, we too can be born again. We can be renewed and restored and lifted. Because of Him, the weights of this world can be lightened.

I find so much comfort in knowing that any pain or suffering I experience in this life can be healed in Christ. And that through my own experiences with suffering, I am being made more holy, even like my Savior.

I am grateful, in my weakness and my trials, to know that- even when it seems that no one else knows what I going through- Christ understands perfectly. He knows exactly how I’m feeling, what I’m experiencing. And because of that, He also knows perfectly how to make me whole again.

If there is anyone out there that has felt heavy with the burdens of life, I would invite you to look to Christ. Pray for strength and healing from God, and you will find it in the Savior of the world.

Over the years, my Church has put out a lot of different videos for Easter, helping to celebrate Christ and the spirit of this Easter Season.

If you are looking for ways to feel inspired and uplifted by the Lord, you can find the whole list of video messages here.

But I wanted to include here as well one of my very favorites from a few years.

I hope that this Easter season you can find your own ways to honor Christ and celebrate His great victory over death- both temporal and spiritual.

I hope that you can open your heart to feel His love for you, and know that He is there; that He cares about you, and knows better than anyone else what you are going through and how to help you overcome it all.

Coming to know my Savior has and is continuing to change my life, and I am so grateful for the person that I am becoming in and through Him.

Happy Easter!

DP