It's hard at a holiday weekend not to think about my family back in New Zealand and feel, even in just a small way, that press of homesickness against my chest. One of the inevitabilities of living on the far side of the world is that you're going to miss your family until you see them again. The other inevitability is that sometimes it can be a year or two before you do.

The worst part of being away is not the moment of saying goodbye, it is the moment just after. When I've waved for last time and walked through the airport security door, I know I won't see my family again for many months but I also know they are so close - just a few metres behind me. It's hard not to think, I could turn around and go back out and see them all again. I don't have to say goodbye. But I do. I remember a year ago, at Easter, standing in a Piazza in Rome looking at the Metro station where my sister and her husband had just gone in, wanting to run down after them instead of turning around to catch my flight back to London - not able to leave until I had waited so long I was sure they themselves had already caught their train and gone.

And now at Easter I think of Jesus on the cross and God in Heaven looking down. God watching His Son being whipped, beaten, mocked and crucified. God watching as His Son, whom He loved so completely, was taken from Him for the first time in all eternity. Surely God wanted to step down, to stop it happening. The awesome creator of the universe, how much would He have desired to set His Son free, to bring him back home. Surely, He would have wanted to take action; throw a few thunderbolts, strike down the soldiers, to rage and roar "Leave my Son alone!". But, instead, God turned his head, let such a void open between them that for the first time in his life, Jesus was left crying out "My God, why have you forsaken me!", and watched His only son die.

What could possibly compel God to let His son go. What reason could be so great, what prize so precious that God would stay His hand and let His son die.

John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever should believe in Him would not perish but have eternal life."

What wonder is this. The thing that held God back, the reason for His silence, the prize that God considered worth abandoning His own Son to death for - was Me. And You.

I am so desperately guilty of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace. So often accepting my forgiveness without considering the price that was paid for it. But at Easter, pausing to survey the wondrous Cross, I recognise the deep truth in the words of that song:

"Love so amazing, so Divine. Demands my life, my soul, my all."