A Lesson Amidst the Easter Egg Hunts

My maternal grandmother, Elsie (Wildner) Tiemann, was quite an Easter enthusiast: every year it was customary to have a new dress and shoes for the holiday, but one year she sewed complete Easter outfits for all three of us Citzler grandkids, and these were quite dressy, as I recall.

For me, she made a dotted-Swiss shirtwaist dress, complete with petticoats, and I also got new black patent Mary Jane shoes, a white purse and gloves, along with a dotted-Swiss-decorated white straw hat! It all required many dreaded fittings, to get the sleeves to puff just right, the hem the precise length, the collar to stand or lay just so. What a relief, though, to get out of all those new clothes, once church and picture-taking were over with!

My two brothers were equally subjected to the torture: each of them was dressed in white Easter suits: short white pants, white two-button jacket, white shirt and black bow tie, both with new shoes and socks too. But new Easter outfits alone were not enough for Grandma. We also had to have a big Easter dinner, and then an afternoon Easter Egg Hunt, par excellence! This meant maybe 100 plastic candy-filled eggs and 30 dyed boiled eggs hidden throughout the yard and flower garden, but also about a dozen all-green plastic eggs hidden in especially hard-to-find spaces, because they all had MONEY in them! Sometimes it was a quarter, or a half-dollar coin, or dollar bills or even one with a five-dollar bill inside. By the time I was in college, her Easter egg hunts were still going on, but in the woods at the family cabin down on Dogwood Creek west of La Grange, and then with as much as a ten-dollar bill in the one or two of the money eggs!

Grandma’s hiding places for the money eggs were worked out long in advance, and involved complicated hints when the one or two hardest-to-find ones were still out there somewhere!!! She was not beyond burying an egg under a galvanized bucket full of rain water (seemingly from a shower just the night before), or having Grandpa tuck a green egg into his coat pocket, or even saving a bird nest from the year before and camouflaging it (with the $5 egg) into tree foliage up high, well out of our reach.

I never really worked out then in my own mind why she enjoyed so much having us hunt so hard for those money eggs. Now, I think it must have been her way of teaching us that rewards do not come without hard work and careful thought, a good lesson for all of us to teach our kids and grandkids, I’m sure.

But beyond that now, I relate this search for treasure to the stories of Jesus in the Bible: the precious pearl found in a field, or the lost sheep or the lost coin. While all of those stories seem to make US the ones who need to seek out treasure, meaning us finding Jesus or coming to faith in Him, I think Jesus’ message in those stories is really that GOD is in search of US! If we do all the work, seeking the God we are comfortable with, trying to live up to God’s expectations, we will likely be disappointed. I don’t believe God is just about comforting us, but also discomforting and challenging us, so that we grow and change and open our hearts to look beyond ourselves to the needs of others.

While our secular lives may be based on the principle that “good things come to those who work,” God’s principle is that there is no work we can do to save ourselves. Rather, since we are already saved by the cross and empty tomb (work Jesus has done on our behalf), we are free instead to work in God’s kingdom, caring for the creation and for others in need.

Happy Easter, dear friends! May all the Easter eggs you find fill you with great joy, just as God joys in finding you this Easter and always!

Annette Citzler is a La Grange native and former professor at Texas Lutheran University.