Easter Monday might be the most overlooked and under-theologized holiday on the Christian calendar. Pastors and clergy get the day off after a busy week (or day, or weekend, depending on the tradition) of Eastering. The rest of the world is back to work (With a few exceptions. Apparently Easter Monday is a bank holiday in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland). For the handful of folks who take part in a Lenten practice - beer, Social media, and bonbons are back on the table again.

Nothing happened on "Easter Monday" from a Biblio-historical perspective. It's doesn't commemorate an event or a time or a moment in the life of Christ or the apostles.

But as I come back to work this morning, I think about the insignificant time we get to breath the air of this planet's atmosphere, and I feel the hope.

Few mentally and physically healthy people long for death. There are folks who love the euphoria that comes with taunting death. People who jump out of airplanes or free-solo El Capitan. Personally, I have never been one who looks for near-death experiences. I've had at least one that I know about. I'm not interested in inviting lady death any closer than she needs to be.

But I am keenly aware she's coming for me.

This Easter we may all be more aware of death's presence than usual. More people have died in America over the past 12 months than a normal year, due to a pandemic. I have a friend who lost both parents and one of the key spiritual mentors in my life is gone because of the cursed disease that has impacted everyone in the world.

At the very least, it's been a stark reminder: pandemic or no pandemic, none of us make it out alive.

And there's the hope of Easter Monday.

Today is a new day. A new week. A new year. We should mark "Christian New Year" as Easter Monday. Today is the day to start living, because the bodily resurrection of Jesus means he has started the process of making everything new. The great reversal of death and the curse has begun. This isn't just an application for sometime in the distant future. The application starts now.

The business podcast I'm working on today matters.
The time spent with my wife and kids matters. The words I write, matter. The classes I teach to people who do business and ministry all over the world matters.
Their work matters.
Your work matters.

It matters because we are now in partnership with a holy work that will someday culminate with the re-creation of everything. Wrongs will be made right. Injustices will be made just. Everything sad will become untrue.

Easter Monday is a day of great hope and celebration — and, perhaps most important, a day of meaning. The resurrection gives meaning to what we used to think of as mundane. There is no more mundane. There's no longer a need to differentiate the sacred and the secular. Your physical work now has deep, spiritual significance.

If you're a banker in Wales, enjoy your day off today — and know that what you do tomorrow matters. How you do your work matters. We take part in a new economy, and what we create now has significance for what's to come.

So happy Easter Monday to you. Here's to celebrating every good endeavor while living — and the remaking of everything that's to come.