As I begin this, I just got home from Palm Sunday Mass. It is a beautiful morning: warming sun, light breeze, hints of green. It is a time of beginnings.

It is the beginning of Holy Week which will be near it’s end when you read this. Glorious Easter will follow.

It is the beginning of the growing season. The tentative plan here is to begin planting this week. It is tentative, like all farming plans. It will take cooperation from the weather, machines, and soil. As they say, God’s plans are sometimes not our plans.

It is the beginning of baseball season. I haven’t played softball in a great while and baseball for decades. But on these model spring days, I feel an urge to throw a ball. I think those urges never leave us. That is why some of us are sure there will be a ballpark in Heaven.

The fan part of me predicts the Twins will win the World Series this year. I have made the same prediction every spring since I was 5 or 6. Speaking of plans going awry, the beginning of the Twins’ season was like me going out into the field and immediately getting the tractor stuck.

The link between Easter and Spring is etched in us. I can remember hiding Easter eggs for our kids on piles of snow. But typically, Easter comes with hints of the Spring season. This is a late Easter, so there are more than hints.

Eggs, baby bunnies, chicks, daffodils, and baskets of Easter grass all have a place. But this is a northern hemisphere bias. On the other side of the planet, Easter comes in the fall. There, it would have some of the trappings of our Thanksgiving.

Regardless of where you live on the globe, for Christians, Easter is the core and center of our beliefs. Jesus died for our sins in the ultimate loving act on the dark and sad Good Friday. Just when it seemed like hate won, Easter morning comes, and love wins.

Thank God. Literally.

Speaking of holy days, our daughter Abby is living in Amman, Jordan. Through her, I have learned about Ramadan. Many of her neighbors and co-workers are Muslim, and Ramadan is a sacred time in their year. Ramadan honors the time the holy book, the Quran, was revealed to the prophet Muhammed.

It is a month of fasting and prayer, with a focus on community. It bears similarity to our Lent. Their fasting is the hyper version of our fasting though. Abby’s Muslim friends do not eat or drink from sunup to sundown. The meal at sundown is called the “Iftar,” a daily celebration with family and friends. Abby enjoyed being invited to one of those.

Continuing with holy days, members of the Jewish faith celebrate Passover in this springtime of year. Our Christian Holy Week is wholly connected to Passover. Jesus’ last meal with the apostles, Holy Thursday, was a Passover meal. It’s something to think that Passover has been celebrated for over 3,000 years.

When our kids were young, we had a Passover commemoration in the church basement on Tuesday of Holy Week. I remember the “bitter herbs,” which were horseradish and parsley. I liked honoring the tie we have with the Jewish people.

There you have it, Christians, Muslims, Jews all having sacred times around the same time on the calendar. All of us are making efforts to be better people and grow closer to the Creator.

The three of us together are the Abrahamic religions. All of us share Abraham as a first prophet.

The history of our time together on Earth has not always been good. There have been times and places of acrimony and antagonism. Worse, there have been wars.

But each of these religions guides millions of people to be better, to be kinder, to be loving. We can respect our Abrahamic brothers and sisters. We share a planet after all. And we do share a God. A God who made each of us and wants good for us.

Back to my Palm Sunday. Holy Week, planting, and baseball bounced around in my head. The sunniness of the day matched a sunniness inside. Then came clouds. As I sat with final cup of coffee before going outside to some pleasant task, I checked the news. I can’t help it. I do that instinctively.

News. The White House took this Sunday morning to announce their goal to deport 1 million people this year. If you’ve read my words before, you know my feelings about that. Ignoring the fact that it’s impossible to accomplish given the damage it would do to our economy, it’s plain cruel. That’s one million people. The huge majority are good and decent and hard working. Most are Christians.

News. Russia bombed a central neighborhood in Sumy, Ukraine. People were gathered for Palm Sunday. They were not much different than the people I was with an hour before at St. Mary’s. Thirty-four civilians were given horrible deaths, many of them children. Vladimir Putin says he is a man of faith. He knew it was Palm Sunday.

News, Israel bombed one of the last barely functioning hospitals in Gaza. Twenty-one were killed, children among them. This is a hospital that has not received medicine, food, or fresh water for several weeks. Israel claimed there was a Hamas presence there. The doctors who survived the attack denied that. It is against international law to target innocents. The bombs were American.

My buoyant mood on this perfect Palm Sunday morning shrunk. Each piece of news was soul-crushing.

How?

How is it that our species can build up these three great global religions that all teach goodness and kindness?

Yet we are capable of such abject cruelty?

Someone smarter than me will have to explain how that is possible. I can’t.

Evil always feels big and powerful. It has it’s days. Like Good Friday.

But there is Easter, and love wins. All we can do is trust that will happen again and again.

— Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye, where he lives with his wife, Pam.