2021 Easter holiday reflection reminds me at age eleven years, and I had not heard the word Easter holiday. As a maid, one of my assignments was to take three kids in the family to Sunday school mandated by the colonial government to school children. The Sunday school took place in the classroom. After Sunday school, the children and I joined their mother at the church building’s adult service. It was at the church service I first heard the hymn, “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins.”
In Gīkūyū, “Kwīna rūī rūa thakame ya Immanuel mwene, Nao ehia marikītio ruo mathiraga gīko biū.” It was my first time going to the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), 1954, PCEA Ngemwa. I did not know how to read or write. I had not heard of the word God or Ngai or Jesus, or Holy Spirit neither sin. To my ear, I listened to the last three words, like two words that I did not understand the meaning of. I wondered what “mathiraga gīkobiū” meant until one day the leading pastor read the first stanza word by word and understood it well that it was not gīkobiū but gīko-dirt, biū, all. Three years later, I confessed my sin and became a born again Christian after a preacher told the word of God to me, and he said to me, “there is a God, Ngai up there,” he pointed upward the sky where Ngai lives, he continued to say, “Ngai sees all people and dislikes bad things the children and adults do.” He led me to the salvation of Jesus Christ.
The bad things I did were eating all sugar in the sugar container, eating soft bread and leaving outside skeleton, and pretending I ate my eggs yet hid them and hid them under the soil. I was scared that Ngai saw me even though my parents, siblings, or anyone else did not see me. At times a bit of sugar remained on my lips, for there was no mirror in the house to help clean my lips well, yet I denied it was not I that ate sugar. In this Easter holiday, Matthew 19:16-18, NIV “… the soldiers took charge of Jesus. 17 Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha). 18 There they crucified him…” Jesus paid the penalty of my sins to free me from the bad things I did.
Easter holiday John 16:16-18, thank Jesus for saving and forgiving my sins through the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, John 28:6- 6 He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. John 19:17-18, so that when I die, I will raise as he did and live with him in heaven. My testimony reaches out to someone out there without knowing the meaning of the Easter holiday and relates to the love of God through Jesus Christ. John 3:16-18, For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.