Easter 2014

Easter is quickly catching up with Christmas as my favorite holiday.  I love the time of year, the message, the decorations, everything.  Like Christmas, we stretched this season out for weeks which was lovely.  Easter egg hunts, parties, carnivals, services, meals...we did it all.

Our study in BSF this year has been Matthew and of course the resurrection week fell directly on Easter  {His perfect timing!}.  Never has the season been so alive, meaningful, relevant, and "really real" {as our pastor put it this morning}.

As he also said this morning,
"If Jesus's resurrection is really real, what is really different about your life because of it?"

Because when you understand and live into the fact that it is REALLY real - it has to change you.  It has to change something.

I hope Easter was really real for you this year! And how amazing when Easter falls on one of the most perfectly SPRING days of the year so far...at least here in South Alabama :)

I am realizing more and more everyday how alive the Word of God is - and it overwhelms, excites, and encourages me.  What joy there is in celebrating LIFE and life ABUNDANT.  The days ahead are guaranteed to not always be as beautiful and cheerful as today has been, but I am so thankful for them in that they make days like today even more of a gift.

Pretty dresses, smiling children, fresh flowers and sunny days - I realize these are not accurate snap shots of my every day life.  My every day life is quite remarkably not all those things.

But I know that through them all, good or bad, home cooked meals or second pizza-night in a row, pretty smocked dresses and seersucker or old pajamas and dirty rain boots, smiling or ...not smiling, He will be the same tomorrow as He is today, and He is the same today as He was yesterday.

And He will be found - in the sun or the rain, in the posed smiling family picture or the stressful exhausted end of a day that just didn't go as planned.  All we have to do is

ASK

SEEK

KNOCK

And after over a year of forgetting, I finally FINALLY remembered to ask someone to take a holiday family picture of us, when we were all dressed up and fancy.

I know far too well how hard something like this is to come by, and it is something I will treasure forever.  For a moment we were all clean, all happy, all smiling, all together


and in much more important news:

for eternity we are all REDEEMED

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade--kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

- 1 Peter 1:3-5

HAPPY EASTER!