He is Risen, Indeed!

Yes, I am aware of the fact that we celebrated the resurrection of Jesus a week and a half ago, and that this is not a very timely post. I am obviously behind in posting anything new to the blog though, just as I am behind in most other things in my life. I was going to try to just give a brief overview of some of the things that we did to prepare for and celebrate Easter using mostly pictures, but, unfortunately, I did not take pictures of a lot of the things we did. So, I will do my best to just kind of sum everything up.

Each day of the Holy Week, starting with Palm Sunday, we did something a little different to try to prepare for Easter. Actually, we started our first project a couple of weeks before that because it needed time to grow. Here is our "Hill of Calvary" that we created. The idea came from here, and then we just added a couple little touches of our own.

On Good Friday, we pinned Jesus up on the cross. We also created a list of some of our own sins that we could think of and pinned those up with Jesus on the cross, representing, of course, that our sins are what put Him there.

On Friday night, we took Jesus (and our sins) down off of the cross and placed them in the tomb. The soldiers were Jake's idea. He put them there to guard the tomb. (As you can see, our grass started to die and look a little sad!)

On Easter morning, the "stone" was rolled away, and Jesus was no longer there. He had risen!

The Thursday before Easter we did our own version of a Passover dinner. We read about Jesus' last supper and talked to them about communion and what it represents. Jake and Addi took their first communion with us and then we washed each other's feet and talked about why Jesus did that and about ways that we can be servants to others. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of any of those things. I think that the munchkins were most excited about getting to drink grape juice. They seem to think they had never had it before, but I'm not so sure. Regardless, you can see where their priorities are!

Then, in an effort to put into practice the fact that we are to be servants, as well as to incorporate the idea that Jesus is "the bread of life," "the bread that was broken for us," etc., we baked some homemade bread for our neighbors. The kids really loved doing all the kneading, watching it rise, etc. I'm thinking that we definitely need to do that more often. If only I could just relax a little more when we take on those projects. I'm constantly on them about being more careful, trying not to make a mess, etc. I know that I take a lot of the fun out of it. Fortunately, they still seemed to love doing it, so I guess I didn't totally ruin the experience.

We did a few other things throughout the week and on Easter morning (like these "He is Risen Rolls") that I did not get any pictures of, but here are a couple of Easter morning pictures. (I really did take some other ones of the morning, as well as of the afternoon with family, but I can't seem to figure out where they ended up.)

We did a couple of "Spring" activities as well, but chose to keep those separate from Easter. I'm sure you will not be surprised to hear that the Easter Bunny does not visit the Herron home because we don't want to confuse the kids about what Resurrection Sunday is really all about. So, we still did egg coloring and an egg hunt, but did them prior to our Holy Week activities. We explained to the kids that those types of things are fun Spring activities but that they do not play any part in our celebration of Easter and the amazing sacrifice that Jesus made for all of us.

I will leave you with a couple of pictures of those oh-so-Holy activities...because nothing says "He is Risen" like a bunch of kids fighting each other for a million little eggs filled with a million little pieces of junk!