Love Got There First

Christ is risen!

Last week in San Francisco, a woman named Maxime Rancourt stepped into the Pacific for a quick cold plunge. Within seconds, a rip current dragged her out into the surf. She lost her glasses and couldn’t see. Somehow, she scrambled onto a jagged rock ledge, seventy feet below a cliff’s edge.

For more than 30 minutes, 56-degree surf crashed over her. She couldn’t climb up. She couldn’t swim back. All she could do was hold on and hope someone would see her.

A stranger spotted her from above. A firefighter rappelled down and pulled her to safety. Later, she met her rescuer in person and told him: “Because of you, I’m going to have a future, and I’m going to have kids.”

That’s resurrection language — whether she knew it or not. Not just “I survived,” but “life is opening up again.” There is a future. This is not the end.

Easter makes the same claim on a cosmic scale. What looked finished — sealed in a tomb, stone rolled into place — became the beginning of something entirely new. Death did not get the final word. Life did.

And it rarely arrives the way we expect. Maxime couldn’t see what was coming — she’d lost her glasses. Mary Magdalene couldn’t either. She came to the tomb expecting to grieve and found it empty. Neither of them understood at first. The new life was already happening before they could make sense of it.

Maybe that’s how it works for us, too. Hold on. Life is coming — even now.