Tomorrow is Easter Sunday and I feel the anticipation in my heart growing. This is because I love everything about Easter.

Unlike some of my fellow believers, who look critically upon Easter visitors because they seem to lack the motivation to corporately worship God on a regular basis, I like the fact that we will see unfamiliar faces and young children dressed in their Easter best. I honor the idea embraced by many families that tomorrow is a day worth shopping, planning and traveling for. Someone who may want to do the church thing but is married to a reluctant spouse can legitimately have his or her way on Easter Sunday — especially with the promise of Easter brunch afterwards!

It is healthy that those of us who haul ourselves out of bed most Sundays are being observed and assessed. It affords us the opportunity to step back for a moment, distance ourselves from our own routines, and honestly evaluate how we are conducting ourselves. Best of all, the Easter holiday is filled with opportunities to legitimately act in loving ways toward people we do not know.

Many of those acts of love include Easter eggs. This week Cub Scout Den 4, from Pack 98, dyed Easter eggs with residents of a memory care unit at a local retirement center. What a joy it was to watch my son and his buddies dye those eggs and interact with residents and staff members. There is a marvelous kinship that presents itself when the very young and the very old interact and I know that if it were not for those eggs, we might not have gotten those boys inside the facility. As it was they found wonder there. They met a woman who has experienced 100 Easters and they discovered that singing campfire songs is a whole lot of fun indoors as well — especially when the audience cares not one bit if you are off key.

There is great joy to be experienced Easter morning because the season of Lent stands in such contrast to the celebration. Lent is designed to be a sobering time and to experience the weeks as they were intended. I have contemplated the roles Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, and Mary the Mother to Jesus played. I have traversed the pages of my Bible and surfed the Internet for facts about each person and it has been a fascinating endeavor.

There is one last task, left for today, that needs to be done before we break loose in joy and celebration tomorrow. Author Josh McDowell calls it “evidence that demands a verdict,” and he is referring, of course, to the evidence that Jesus actually died and arose.

There is nothing wrong with asking the tough questions and probably the first one to ask is this: Wonder if Jesus was only unconscious and later revived? This might have happened except for the fact that an official Roman soldier, tasked to observe the crucifixion with the idea that the hysteria among the Jews could be brought to a proper end, reported to Pilate that Jesus was dead. It was also reported that Jesus’ side had been pierced during the execution and when the deed was done Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had customarily wrapped Jesus’ body and placed it in a tomb.

What about the women who reportedly returned the following day to care for the body? Perhaps they went to the wrong tomb. According to several accounts, found in various places in the gospels and ancient writing, Mary Magdalene and Jesus’ mother watched as Jesus’ body was entombed. Not only that but on Sunday morning apostles Peter and John went to the same tomb and did not get lost along the way.

Might the body have been stolen? This could have occurred were it not for the Roman soldiers who diligently sealed and guarded the tomb. Losing the body would placed their lives in jeopardy with their superiors. It would also empower Christ’s followers and further inflame an already enormous problem for the Romans. If a Roman had been able to produce the body once it was discovered missing, it would have quelled all rumors once and for all. No Roman would steal the body and certainly no follower would either, for in time Christ’s followers not only grew to span the globe but countless voluntarily gave up personal comfort as well as their lives for the right to tell the world that a relationship with Christ promised life everlasting.

Tomorrow, I’ll tiptoe Easter baskets into my childrens’ rooms, enjoy a cup of coffee and a hot crossed bun, and rejoice. He is risen, indeed!

Joan Bay Klope is a freelance writer and former editor of Christian books.