I ended up at my cousins’ house for a couple minutes the other day, looking for a pie server, of all things.

Seek and ye shall find…

But I suppose I hadn’t even know what I was looking for. Exhausted from work at school and then the dry cleaners, and on my way to the next activity, I didn’t know how badly I needed the healing touch of a three-year-old.

She met me with her wispy hair and ebullient smile in the driveway. She was eager to get back to her big brother, who was playing in the bushes.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“I dunno…COME ON!”

Her small but mighty words pointed me to Christ, and the mystery of the empty tomb.

“Where is he?” the disciples had wondered. Yes, Peter and John ran towards the emptiness of the tomb. But the overwhelming sense I get of the disciples (and often myself) post-Resurrection is the arrival of a great fear of the unknown.

“Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus himself says in Matthew 18:3. Through the revelation of holy wonder that came through my cousin’s eyes, I got a glimpse of this change of heart.

To be free to explore the unknown, knowing it’s in uncertainty that we meet and welcome Christ. To be unashamed of our limitations of knowledge and unafraid to be changed by the newness of life that meets us next. To desire being together in the breaking of the bread, though it never breaks exactly the same way twice.

“I don’t know…come on” is such a basic instinct in my small cousin but such a stretch for me. As I finish my job at the school tomorrow morning (hmm I am supposed to be grading right now but this seemed important), I approach my fear of the empty tomb. Would that this is the road to Emmaus, my cousins’ driveway, and that I can welcome the inevitably unexpected presence of Jesus in the stranger (or three year old) I didn’t know I needed.

For now, I set out to enjoy my last foggy morning drive past the cows and wild turkeys, to the parking lot that also knows how to welcome each uncertain day.