When you play peekaboo with a very young baby who has not yet developed object permanence, you actually feel kind of mean. As soon as your hands obscure your face, their little eyes widen with alarm and their expression crumbles into confusion and despair.
 
Because they can no longer see you, they believe you no longer exist. Their little brains are unable to understand that just because a thing cannot be seen, it is still there, still alive, still full of love and care and protection.
 
Aw, man, you can hear them thinking. I guess I don’t have a mom anymore.
 
On Easter morning, Mary Magdalene sees the burial cloth but no body. Her human mind makes sense of the situation the best way it knows how, she assumes the Lord has been taken. I’m sure I would have thought the same thing, in her position.
 
She cannot conceive, on her own, the reality that Christ has risen from the dead. It doesn’t matter that he has told his disciples again and again that this will happen. They weren’t ready to understand then.
 
In many ways, Easter is when the human race really achieved object permanence. But we still struggle with it, don’t we? I certainly do. So often I can be heard accusing God: “You weren’t there. Where were you? I couldn’t find you.”
 
But I looked for him in the flesh. I looked for him in the stale yeast of the world — in money or success or affirmation or (worst of all) convenience and pleasure. Of course, I would not find him there, among the dead.
 
Think of what is above, not of what is on earth. — Colossians 3:2