Easter

Easter morning.  If we aren’t traveling for the Easter holiday, we often first visit a beautiful church in our community that has an amazing organ, a big choir, handbells, and a brass ensemble to start our day of worship, and then we attend the latest service at our normal church.  Longtime readers might recall our 2013 visit to the first church, where we arrived cloaked in the distance odor of cat pee.

Our plan was somewhat similar but a little different this year (although we had no intentions of repeating the cat pee odor).

It is an Easter tradition in our family to attach the Easter baskets to a piece of colored yarn, woven all around the house from room to room.  Each kidlet wakes up and follows the string from the bed through the yard spiderweb to the hiding place of their Easter basket.  I considered skipping this tradition this year, but it was met with fierce resistance and disappointment.  Easter wouldn’t be Easter without the string attached to the baskets.  (I really make it difficult for the big kids . . . sometimes it takes them 20 minutes or so to decipher the web).  OK.  The night before Easter I was up into the wee hours of the night filling baskets and weaving a yard spider web. At 1:30 a.m. I did the army crawl on my stomach to get back to my bed underneath all that yarn.  Literally, I had worked up a sweat climbing under and over yarn for the last hour.

I never worry about burglars on Easter Eve.

At 5:45 on Easter morning my eldest woke me up to drive her to church.  She had forgotten about the spiderweb, and tripped a few times on her way to the shower, but managed to get ready for church at the crack of dawn. I drove her to our church where she helped with the youth group pancake breakfast all morning.

By the time I left, the other kidlets had started working their way through the yarn to their Easter baskets.

I got back, showered, and dressed for church.  The kidlets started eating the cereal in their Easter baskets. Mr. SP went back to bed, which put him on track for being late to get into the shower he very much needed.  That caused me to nag and Dr. Peds to wake up frustrated.  On his way to enforce Mr. SP’s waking hour he tripped on the string, which caused him to yell and grouch and grump.  So everyone started winding up the remnants of the spiderweb, but because that is a big, tangly job, we only got halfway finished by the time I looked at the clock, which I remembered was 15 minutes slow, and realized that we were quickly on track to BEING LATE for the church service at the first church we were attending.  I started nagging and grouching at everyone to get in the car, with a certain degree of hysteria in my voice, because I HATE being late to church.  Especially a church we are visiting.  Plus I knew this church service was going to be packed, and it would be hard to find a parking spot, and hard to find a place for us to sit.  Stress!

We got in the car and drove down the hill to the church and had no trouble finding a parking spot.  Hooray.

We walked in the sanctuary and the choir was practicing, but not many people were there, and that’s when I realized that the service really started at 8:30, so we were 40 minutes or so early.  Sweet relief.  Dr. Peds was convinced I had planned the whole thing, but I had not.

The service was beautiful.  Triumphant.  I was so enjoying the organ, the music, the liturgical structure to corporate worship (I’m just a Lutheran girl at heart).  Then, halfway through the second scripture reading, Mr. SP starts to stumble sideways again and faints.  I caught him, and we laid him down on the pew/chairs until he came through.  He had even eaten a big breakfast this time, but . . . low blood sugar, a super warm, packed church, and standing up for a chunk of time.  Maybe he locked his knees, I don’t know.  Regardless, down he went with a grey-green face.

So there were were, with a semi conscious kid, at a packed church, and it wasn’t even like at our own church where I could just run down to the kitchen and find something to revive the poor kid.  Eventually we got him sitting up again and a nice gentleman gave him a piece of candy to suck on which helped.

Always an adventure.

After the postlude (have I mentioned that I REALLY appreciate that organ?!?  Man it was awesome!) we headed back to our car, drove up the hill, and made Mr. SP change out of his tennis shoes and white socks (worn with black pants) because we didn’t catch that the first time around.  Mr. SP couldn’t find his own black socks, so he swiped some of Dr. Peds’ socks, which didn’t go over well.  The ride to our own church was a bit grouchy.

Upon arriving at our own church, we headed downstairs to have a pancake brunch.  Dr. Peds got a big kick out of having YaYa bring him coffee.  She got her revenge by bringing over the pitcher of decaf.

Our own church worships very differently on Easter.  It was good to go to both places because there is also joy in worshipping with your church community.  I’m grateful for God’s grace that covers the chaos, the sins deep down and the mistakes and crazy on the surface.

Happy Belated Easter!  I hope your morning went smoothly.