Easter is coming soon. It should be the grandest of holidays on earth. However Christmas takes that role. It seems market dollars increase in greater proportion when buying frenzies are based on a birth rather than a death. Profit lines have not grasped a handle on the concept of resurrection. Thus candy canes and egg nog rank higher on the profit margin than Peeps and hollow chocolate bunnies.
Easter Day’s date fluctuates, unlike Christmas’ assigned December 25. Easter occurs on each first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. That means the day set aside for Resurrection Celebration, including that at Angelkeep, relies heavily on nature, not history. If the full moon would happen to land on Sunday, then Easter would be the following Sunday.
Angelkeep has forever been a strong believer in the Christian historical account of Jesus being the Son of God. It’s fact based on faith. Thusly goes the Good Friday observance of the Christ child, as a man, being crucified on a cross unto death. Complete human and eternal death. God the Father allowed that. That’s a mandatory belief if anyone desires to be known as Christian. Easter celebrates resurrection. That dead Christ of the human body, returning to life. An ascension to Heaven for all eternity followed, He to sit at the right hand of God His Father. For some it’s too much to grasp. So for those naysayers, why would any of them want to stock up on jellybeans or dye-color eggs?
Very soon, April 8, 2024, to be exact, the day prior to a new moon, the daylight will darken at Angelkeep to nearly the level of nighttime. It will be an extraordinary event that surely panicked the naysayers well before the alignment of planet and moon could be fully comprehended.
Angelkeep expects the total to roughly begin about 3:09 pm and last to about 3:12 pm, or so, producing nighttime darkness during daytime for a totality of under four minutes. What will happen in the darkness? Will millions travel to total eclipse areas and cause highway gridlock? Will offices close? Will restaurants be disastrously overrun with hungry travelers both before and after the darkened minutes? Will hospitals be overrun with the blind due to protective eyewear being sold out and unavailable? Will insanity reign?
Besides eclipse eyewear, what will the marketers promote? Moon Pies? Angelkeep, for one, would certainly entertain trying a Moon Pie Blizzard at DQ. M&M’s could sell moon-size bags using only black and white candy colors. Indiana’s official state sugar crème pie might be renamed shadow crème pie.
Justifiable hype over the total eclipse passing through Indiana soon brings on a comparison of a similar, but different, event taking place in the first century at a location far from Angelkeep. They called it Golgotha. A place of a skulls, as the King James translated. Since medieval times this spot became a pilgrimage destination. It is somewhat comparable to the expected pilgrimage of millions journeying to a location ideal to view the eclipse.
“And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha…they gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall…” Some suggest when the eclipse occurs that bottled water and other drinks will be scarce, local supplies liquidated by travelers. Will taverns offer up a special elliptical mixed drink?
On what we now call Good Friday, soldiers in charge of the cross duty ended labors by casting lots for Christ’s garments, leaving him clad in a loin cloth. “And sitting down they watched him there.”
It very well could be that eclipse travelers into the area nearby Angelkeep will find little space left to set up a campsite with a shade canopy, and spread recliners beside amply-filled chest coolers. What they will await can be read about later in the gospel, or a similar facsimile. The soldiers at Jesus’s feet were unprepared for the natural event to occur.
Chief priests, scribes, and elders mocked the hanging “King of the Jews,” as indicated by a sign. “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Jesus, when he had cried again…yielded up the ghost.”
Did God use a natural phenomenon like an eclipse, but in a different and bolder way, to emphasize His plan for sin salvation? Golgotha’s darkness ran three hours. The Great American Eclipse will run just over four hours, minutes of totality countable on one hand.
Was God’s perfect natural plan of creation collaborated with the eventual crucifixion day including a time of darkness, originating back to Genesis? Faith makes Angelkeep a believer.
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
