Easter time!

Easter is just under two weeks away - can you believe it?!

Anyways, in order to show Christ as what we value the most (although we don't as much as we want to or ought to) Daryl and I have to be really purposeful with our days and times and are oh so thankful for holidays that remind us again to emphasize Jesus Christ and the gospel to ourselves and to our children.

So this post is really just an encouragement to be thinking about Easter and to perhaps plan now how you will "take advantage of it" to encourage your souls to look again at Jesus - his death and resurrection - and celebrate all that He has accomplished for us! If you have little ones, it is also an especially great time to help them to see Him.

Because our girls are so young and don't have great memories yet, we haven't used Lenten season to teach them of Jesus' death and resurrection, but are waiting to begin on Palm Sunday. We will start out with 7 candles at the table burning brightly on Sunday, read a Scripture each night to hopefully correlate with that week in Jesus' life and then snuff out a candle. Sounds harsh I know, but we hope this snuffing out of a candle will be a visual representation to us all of the Light of Life being put to death. Good news is, after all candles are blown out and we wrap up the story of Christ's death, come Sunday the family will be greeted in the morning with all 7 candles burning brightly again and the retelling of how Jesus conquered the grace! John 1:5, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness HAS NOT overcome it." Yay!

We will be doing some other fun things as well - we've created an Easter week playlist on our Ipods, have special cookies to make, a Lamb cake to bake, and stories we have purchased for the girls. I will post more updates this week in case you are interested in any of the resources we have found that we hope to benefit our families.

The best ideas I steal from others :) My favorite resource for holiday planning is Treasuring God in our Traditions by Noel Piper.

Happy pondering on the cross and feel free to leave any ideas/suggestions/traditions your family enjoys this season!