I love Easter. It might have to do with the fact that I grew up in Europe where winters are grey and dull, and then, just around Easter, nature comes back to life. There is a reason Easter is at the beginning of spring. It is always the first Sunday after the first full moon in spring.

I love all the colours around me, of flowering hedges, butterflies, and blossoms all around. The weather gets warmer and with beautiful sun rises after mild nights with dazzling stars and the first full moon of spring. All that reminds me of the Easter message that there is new life all around us and within us, that Jesus is risen from the grave.

Sometimes it takes a conscious effort to get out of Lent and the winter season back into life and the Easter message can help us with that tremendously.

I like the symbolism around Easter. I love to watch children go on their egg hunt and the joy when they find the colourful eggs, the sweets, or when they fly the colourful kites that try to reach higher spheres. An egg looks as dead as a stone to the eye but new life is inside, so much hope for our lives and the lives of others.

I love to go to Easter sunrise services in Bermuda, as the light slowly and in warm red rises up on the horizon, painting the ocean in a mandarin orange tone. And I look forward to all the good food at Easter. It all shouts at me with joy: wow, life is back, Alleluia! Thanks be to God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit!

All of this helps me to get out of the rut, to celebrate life, to reach out to the people around me. Easter calls us out of the hole we sometimes dig around us. It is an invitation to live life with joy.

Christ is risen! That is a call to dance in the streets, to jump over walls, to sing and rejoice in the many promises of the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour, that we are free to live life in His unfailing love, compassion, and forgiveness.

Easter shows God’s deep love for us and His plan for us to live with Him in eternity.

We all know that life can be difficult at times, there are challenges and tests, but there is also Easter. There is this remarkable inexplicable freedom as Children of God who walk already in newness of life, who can laugh from the belly and rejoice.

I remember a special Easter service many years ago. My father, who was the pastor in our village, said in his sermon that there was an old tradition that the pastor had to tell a joke at Easter in church so people would laugh, get out of the dark winter mood and Lenten fasting and about the freeing effects of laughter.

While I don’t recall whether or what joke he actually told, there was a special moment I will not forget. At the end of the service, after the benediction, my father said in a warm and friendly voice: “And now I wish you all a happy and merry Christmas.”

The church broke out in laughter, and my father was clueless. People thought that was the joke he had preached about, but he had not even realised that he had said Christmas instead of Easter. And yes, Christmas and Easter are closely related.

John 3:16-17 (NIV) tells us: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son [Good Friday], that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life [Easter]. For God did not send his Son into the world [Christmas] to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

In these two verses Christmas, Good Friday and Easter are explained.

The message was that Easter morning in Church was priceless. We need this laughter and joy to disengage from chronic fear and stress. We need the Easter message that “Christ is risen” because of God’s love for us and that we will be raised with him. We can forget about all that is trying to hold us back and enter into new life.

It was this Easter message and the witness of hundreds who had seen the risen Lord, that Christianity spread against all obstacles, persecution, and challenges and is now the biggest religion and hope for more than 2.5 billion people.

There is a new creation, symbolic in all the nature around us that springs to blossom. Let us let go of our innate human fear and embrace Easter.

We can choose to keep our attention on what is good and then we can plant seeds of hope with our neighbours and loved ones. Easter can create this fearless deep trust by relying in the power of Jesus.

So, even if at times we feel our life does not make sense and that things around us are falling apart, we can especially then gently reach out to the presence of Jesus, holding faithfully to His steadfast love and promises of a better way of life than we could ever imagine possible. Christ’s unending love is the answer to fear, negativity, loneliness, and lack of purpose.

We know we can, with His help, change habits of thinking that don’t serve us or our neighbour well, one tiny step at a time. We can learn to choose to keep our attention on what is true and positive.

Jacob Titelbaum suggests that we are sometimes given the misconception that keeping attention on problems is a “realistic” view on life, but he says that this might be nonsense. He says: “Life is like a massive buffet with thousands of options” and that we don’t need to focus only on the problems. For me that means that I look at my brothers and sisters around me and with them choose life and happiness, joy and love.

The apostle Paul writes in Romans 8:31-32 (NIV): “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

Indeed, the stone is rolled away and the grave is empty. Christ is risen! Alleluia! And thus to all of you: “Merry Christmas!”

• Karsten Decker is a German theologian with a double degree equivalent to an MTheol and MDiv. He studied in Marburg (Germany), Knoxville (USA), and Toronto (Canada) and comes from a united church of Lutheran and Reformed Churches. He was the pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Bermuda from 2010 to 2017, and after returning from Germany is now the temporary pulpit supply at Centenary Untied Methodist Church in Smith’s