The Ultimate Easter Egg Hunt

How cool is an Easter egg hunt? All you need to do to possess candy, gum, and money is simply LOOK for it. The concept is so awesome that I would like to be the first advocate for the institution of the Easter Egg Hunt Policy at my job: I go to work, search under my desk, find my paycheck, and go home.

So maybe the Easter Egg Hunt Policy won’t catch on in the workplace anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on egg hunts, just because we aren’t children anymore. Let me explain…

I recently visited the Cathedral Cave, a cavern in the Ozarks first discovered by Fair and Everett Pinnell in 1919. When I walked through the entrance, I saw all the usual things associated with caves: drippy-wet stalactites and stalagmites, clammy walls, bats hanging from the ceiling. What I was not prepared for, however, was the absolute magnitude of the place. Cathedral Cave was a world all of its own, with gently sloping hills, rock formations shining with geodes, a collapsed bridge that once separated two different “floors,” and canyons plunging far beneath my feet. This secret society was host to many inhabitants, including Pipistrelles and myotine bats, camel crickets, wolf spiders, pickerel frogs, and the very interesting grotto salamander.

Our tour guide led us to a stream on the floor of the cave to look for the grotto salamander. These strange lizards are born with completely clear skin. Having never lived under the sun, the salamanders have no use for pigmentation. They are born with eyes, but as there is no light to see with, skin usually grows over them when they become adults. When our guide spotted a salamander, she instructed us to shine our flashlights slightly away from him; his sensitive system could not handle a direct beam of light.

An hour later, as we were trudging out of the cave and back into the bright light of day, I started thinking about the Pinnell brothers. They had been out exploring one day, never expecting that they would stumble onto an entire underground world never before seen in all of recorded history. Had they decided to stay home that day, the cave might still be another undiscovered mystery buried in the earth. All that beauty, wasted on the blind grotto salamander! I asked myself why God would spend so much time on a place that might never have been seen by human eyes. Then, it struck me: God is the inventor of the Ultimate Easter Egg Hunt.

Imagine God sneaking around the earth, giggling to himself as he hides a hollowed-out cave here or a waterfall there. He is pouring water into a ravine and touching His hand to a lake to make it sparkle, all the time anticipating the looks on His children’s faces when they discover his hidden “eggs.” He then sits back, folds his arms, and says to the human race, “Ready…Set….GO!”

Far be if for me to not take on the challenge of the hunt! I do not want to be like that grotto salamander, quietly going about my zero-pigment existence, never venturing out of my dark hole to visit the light-wielding world above. There is an entire universe of hidden “eggs” out there. God is smiling eagerly, waiting for us to find his extravagant, fabulous, beautiful wonders.

Ready, set….GO!