God is Bigger Than the St Louis Cardinals

(I know the title of this might be a little disheartening for some hardcore Cardinal Baseball fans but read on.  Perhaps by the end you might believe it’s true)

One Easter when my daughter Heidi was a preschooler our family attended a St Louis Cardinal baseball game.  Picture this: surrounded by tens of thousands of fans, my husband, son and myself are in jeans and cardinal t shirts but Heidi is still decked out in her Easter finery- shiny shoes, foofy dress and a bow bigger than her head.  Heidi is sitting in my lap with ruffles galore and we are cheering.  But this is no ordinary cheer, we’re cheering our Easter cheer.

What? You don’t have an Easter cheer?  Well, when you have a mom as hyper as I am, you have a cheer for just about anything, so of course there’s an Easter cheer.  It’s actually a cheer we picked up at church.  It goes like this: one person say “He is risen!”  The crowd responds “He has risen indeed!”  The “He” is referring to our Savior Jesus Christ rising from the empty tomb to save all of mankind.  Pretty great stuff.   Sitting in that stadium with our hot dogs, Heidi and I belted that cheer at the top of our lungs.  Some of you may have heard this cheer before but I can tell you that there were cardinal fans that day that were clueless.  How do I know?  Because of the collection of looks Heidi and I were attracting were, shall we say, mixed? 

You see when a preschooler latches on to a new game that makes her mom laugh, you don’t stop after one or two tries.  Oh no.  She kept saying “Do it again mommy!”  So Heidi and I used this cheer for at least 2-3 innings.  Really!  After all, everyone else was saying their own cheers.  Why not us?  You see this is what I learned.  Preschoolers may not know the difference between sports cheers and Jesus cheers but your soul does.

Now what’s that about?  Why would your soul know the difference?  Look at Psalm 71:23: “My lips will shout for joy, when I sing praises to thee; my soul also, which thou hast rescued.”  Praising God impacts more than your lips that speak them or your ears that hear them.  Praises go clear down to your soul.  I think of praises as a superhighway between your soul and the Lord.  Let’s face it, there’s a lot of junk in our lives that can pull us away from praising God.  By lifting our voices in praise we bypass the worries of “what’s next”, the pressure to “get it done” and the burden of “I shouldn’t have.”  Try it!  By speaking praises you reach out to fill yourself with the sweet reminder of what it means to have a Heavenly Father miss you so much that He would send His Son to die for you.  Why?  So you may be reunited for all eternity into God’s loving arms.  So fill up your soul.  Praise God.  “He is RISEN!!  HE has risen INDEED!!!