My Favorite Celebration

Our family loves to celebrate.  And this Easter was no exception.  Tried and true traditions mixed with brand new ones and the expected was spiced up with the surprising.  The constant, though, was the reason for the celebration: He is risen.  For that reason, Easter (or Resurrection Day!) is my favorite holiday, so I share something very special with you in sharing the story of pictures that follow. 

On Friday, we went to a Good Friday service and, as always, it helped me focus my distractable mind on Christ Jesus.  Saturday afternoon, after having scrubbed the house from top to bottom, we engaged in a favorite family activity: egg decorating!  This year we tried a new marbling technique.  The results were a resounding success!

Jonah in the middle of the dying process.

Sunday dawned with our first surprise: sapphire-blue skies and a daffodil-colored sun.  It was so beautiful, in fact, that Mikaela had the inspiration to eat outside, a new twist for a holiday that is usually rained out around here. 

 

But first, we arrived at church bright and early for a breakfast with our dear church family, followed by joyful singing and a challenge from Scripture.  Following church, we had two families of friends over for the afternoon. 

The adorable Carter shows off his discovery.

Bentley, now so grown-up as to look like a relative of a polar bear, discovered an egg we had hidden on top of his dog house.  Before the children were any the wiser, he leaped up, nosed it off, and devoured it whole! 

Mama and I

Lovely Mrs. M.

"Look--what do you see right over there?"

Inspired by various sources (including this one), I decided to plan a different sort of egg hunt this year.  I wanted it to be fun for my siblings who were getting a mite too old for the traditional version, as well as pointing everyone back to the true meaning of the celebration.  Thus, the "Epic Egg Hunt" as Mikaela called it, was born.

Mama and I sneakily stashed clues (which consisted of Bible verses which would lead sleuthers to their next destination) all over while the family waited in suspense inside.  The twist to the whole thing?  The hunters were in pairs, literally: they were tied together three-legged-race style!

Your first clue: "Heavenly hosts praising God."  Go!  After reading that verse, the teams took off until they finally discovered the correct location (our stack of hymnals) which led them on to the second clue.

No one is competitive in our family!

 

Papa and Mr. M. enjoy the show.

It's a race to the finish line!  Down the driveway raced (loped? limped?) the two teams, neck and neck, but in the end Mikaela and Jonah were the grand prize winners of gift certificates to our favorite local frozen yogurt shop. 

Susanna's coconut cake confection

 

These photos let you hear the laughter from our day, meet our friends, and feel the sunshine, but even if a picture is worth a thousand words, yet all of them together fail to capture the essence of what the celebration is to me.  

 

In order to begin to get a glimpse of it, I suppose you would have to have a snapshot of me the week before my fifth Easter, bowing the knee to Christ as my Lord for the very first time.   

 

In order to get the tiniest taste of what Christ's resurrection means to me, you would have to hear me talking to Him during a quiet moment on Easter Sunday, saying, "Thank you, thank you, thank you." 

 

And in order to know why Easter is my favorite holiday, you would have to have a picture of what I have been saved from. 

 

Jesus died for me, and every year and all the days in between I want to be in awe, in tears, and on my knees because of this indescribable, inexpressible, incomprehensible truth: Jesus is alive.