Because We Wanted To

While we were eating dinner last night, Rick said that it occurred to him that for the first time, this Easter, we celebrated it because we wanted to and not because we felt like we had to.

I know for us, in the past, we would do Easter all on Easter day. We'd get up and look in our Easter baskets and then rush to get to church. We'd go to Sunday school, Rick would leave and drive the 15 minutes back to our house to hide eggs and then meet me back at church for service. When it was over we'd take pictures of us in our matching outfits and rush home to hunt Easter eggs. Then, Easter was over. And I can't, for the life of me, remember any Easter message I ever heard sitting in a church service.

This year, because we weren't relying on a pastor to feed us the Easter message, we actually started thinking about Easter and what it meant to us days {maybe even weeks} before it. Then on Saturday we started preparing our hearts, and our kids, for the real meaning of Easter.

For the first time in their lives, the main focus was not on their baskets and eggs .. it was actually on Jesus. (In fact, although I bought the contents of their baskets with some thought, I just threw the baskets together right before we went the bed the night before. We had been so busy with seeing the live production of The Resurrection and making our Resurrection Cookies.) The main focus of our Easter day was celebrating Jesus and what He did for us. And there have been many discussions since Easter Sunday about it.

Easter has lingered over our family for days. At least for me, I'm still basking in the awesomeness of it. I don't think I'm the only one.