Celebrate Easter with Your Children

I stood by the nursery desk, wondering why the nursery leader was late.  I could not remember her being late before.  A few minutes later, she flew in apologizing.  "I'm so sorry I'm late," she said smiling.  "But it is your fault, you know."

"What?" I questioned, wondering what her explanation would be.

"Easter," she explained breathlessly.  "I was up before dawn this morning putting out the items for the treasure hunt.  I awoke the children early and started them on the treasure hunt while I put the hot cross buns into the oven.  You gave us so many good ideas for celebrating Easter that I just had to do some of them, and things took longer than I thought they would."  

She was flustered, but her joy in helping her children celebrate this special day was contageous.  She put down her things and began greeting all the parents with a beaming smile on her face. 

Easter.  It is the focal point of our faith.  Without Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, our faith is in vain.  We cannot begin to explain our own faith without pointing to Christ's work in that last week of his life.  We owe everything to it. The assurance of our relationship to Christ rests in it.  We have no hope without it.  Yet in spite of this, Easter is often an overlooked holiday for many Christians.

Think about it.  Do you look forward to Resurrection Sunday with the same excitement as Christmas?  Do your children?  Do they have reason to shout "The Lord is Risen!" on Sunday morning?  Do they know that this is the most important holiday for Christians?  Do they see your excitement as you prepare that special meal to celebrate with family and friends?  Do they hear you singing precious songs about the suffering of Christ that week as you enter into His suffering, identifying with the Man of Sorrows?  Do they sense from you that this day is more important to you than Christmas?

Let us make Easter a BIG deal for ourselves and for our children.  I am not talking about Easter baskets and Easter bunnies and new clothes.  I am talking about celebrating the week and the day in a way that makes a profound impression on the value of what Christ did for us. Here are just a few suggestions on things that will help children grasp the importance of this week.

• On Palm Sunday, buy small palm branches or make them from construction paper and play out Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem.  Let them re-enact going into town to get the donkey, bringing it back for Jesus, and then laying clothing and palm branches out for the donkey to ride.  Shout "Hosanna to the Son of David together."  Sing praise songs to Jesus, and talk about what it would be like if the stones had actually begun to praise Him.
• Make a picture poster of the events of Jesus' last week.  Each day this week add one picture of what happened on that day.
• Celebrate the Passover Seder together as a family.  There is information online that will help you celebrate this.  Explain that Jesus and his disciples celebrate this together just before He died.  
• If your church has a special service on Thursday or Friday, go together as a family.
• On Friday (or Thursday, if that is your tradition) read together one of the stories in the gospel of the crucifixion.  Whenever a different person is mentioned, try to imagine what it was like for them that day. 
• Find a devotional that you can use to focus your family's devotions on the sacrifice Jesus made.
• Invite people to church for Easter and then home to your house afterwards to eat together.
• Make cards together that celebrate the resurrection.  Send them to friends or pass them out to neighbors.
  
• Have a special Easter dinner.  Serve lamb and talk about Jesus being the Passover lamb.  Make a cake in the shape of a cross or a lamb.
• Make a paper mache or bread dough tomb.  Put together clothespin disciples for the children to reenact the events.  Find a rock to cover the entrance to the tomb.
• Separate your celebration of Spring from Easter.  Celebrate Spring on the first day of Spring.  In your gift for your children, include colored eggs, bunnies, chicks, new clothes, and other special things.
• Attend the Easter Sunrise service, if your church has one.  
• On Easter morning (or afternoon), send your children on a treasure hunt.  Inside small paper or plastic bags or cloth bundles, put symbols of the events of the last week of Jesus' life.  If it will make it more fun, add a small amount of candy to each one.  When all the items are found, see if the children can identify each symbol and tell why it was included.  Then, for older children, see if they can put the symbols in the correct order.  

Easter is coming!  I cannot wait!  But first I will walk through this week with a sorrowful heart as I grieve His horrendous suffering and my own sin that made it so necessary.

Dangerous Comparisons

Recently, I caught an unexpected glimpse of myself from a side view in a long mirror.  Since it was not the way I usually see myself, I was startled by the imperfect posture and the profile that "only a mother would love."  A beauty I am not, and no amount of beauty products or makeup will make me one.  At times, I even pity my husband who is the one who has to look at me the most. In the midst of my reverie, however, I realized the danger of what I was doing.  I took the world's standard of beauty and elevated it above God's.  Without realizing it, I had just told God that He did not do a very good job when He gave me this face, even though I know well that God does everything correctly and perfectly.

All so different

While sin and death mar God's creation, God never intended that everyone have the same high cheekbones, long neck, perfect features, and hourglass figures.  Just as flowers, with all their varying beauty, give honor to God in their uniqueness, God also wants us to reflect His creative power in the very different ways we were made.

Comparing myself to someone else is dangerous for two reasons.  First, it uses the wrong standard for our inspection.  Just as our standard for physical beauty should be God's Word and not what society tells us, we also tend to use the wrong criteria for how well we have done in our activities.  As a student, I depended more on what my grades said than whether I had worked "heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men."  Secondly, it puts us in danger of two serious character flaws - pride and insecurity.  If we surpass man's approval, we can become proud.  If we do not measure up, we can become insecure.  Whenever these two things exist in our lives, it will point to using the wrong standard in our lives.

Let us look at housekeeping, for example.  Unwittingly, we adopt our standard from the picture perfect homes of magazines.  Sometimes we almost apologize for the fact that people live in our home.  Instead of looking to God and His ideas for how our house should be kept clean, we live in fear that our house does not measure up to other people's neat homes.  It is the Lord who judges His children on how well something is done.  After all, he is the Only one who looks beyond the outside and sees our heart attitudes.  He knows if we have done our best with a humble spirit or if we are out to get praise from people.  What matters in our housekeeping is whether or not we have pleased Him.  If we shut our eyes at the end of a long day, all we need to do is say to the Lord, "I did my best today.  I know I did not get everything done and the house is still not as clean as I want it, but I really did do my best."

Sometimes I hear the wrong standard being used in the way we criticize others.  We might not say it aloud, but our attitude reveals that we have applied our own standard instead of God's to the situation.  We need to remember God's words:  "Who art though that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth."  (Romans 14:4)  We have no idea of what was going on in that person's life that day.  We do not know what her attitude was.  We do not know if he worked to the best of his ability.  We do not know if she did it as an offering to God instead of getting approval from people.  We just do not know the whole story.

The plague of comparing ourselves to others dominates our culture.  It results in a lack of what we all so desperately need:  joy, peace, patience, and love.  As a Christian woman, I need to be different.  If I find joy in doing my work for the Lord nd in seeking His "Well done!" at the end of the day, I will be more likely to radiate His peace instead of being anxious.  If I do my work to the best of my ability, I will not bear the burden of guilt for laziness or carelessness.  If I leave the final judgement of others' work to the Lord, I will more likely radiate love and patience when I deal with them.

So the next time I find myself being cricitcal of myself or another, I need to ask myself, "Am I using God's standard, society's standard, or my own?"  Then I need to find out what God's standard is and remember that He is the only one who can truly judge correctly.

March News

Dear friends and family,

“Where are you headed next?”  That is the question we answer most as we go from church to church.  Usually people are asking about trips abroad, but occasionally they mean “Where are you speaking next?”  So this is an update on that question so that you can pray for us.

For the past several months, we have been here in Georgia.  We have had a number of speaking engagements in churches that have asked us to share our ministry.  There have also been opportunities for Charlie to preach or for Joan to teach Sunday School.  This week Joan is starting a 6-week Bible study for ladies’ in our home.  While we are here, we also frequently visit churches to share with them what is going on in our ministry.

In June, we plan to go to Maine.  Our sending church is located there as well as several supporting churches, and we feel it is time to give an update.

The last two weeks in June we are scheduled to go to Peru where we will each be teaching a 30-hour modular course in a Bible college in Arequipa.  Charlie will teach on hermeneutics, and Joan will teach on teaching.  In early July we will return to Maine where we will be for another few weeks.

Here are some of our praises:

•  Opportunities recently to share our ministry with people and churches.
• Joan is teaching a Bible study for ladies again.

Here are our prayer requests:

• Safety in travel – both here in the U.S. and in our trips abroad.
• A full calendar of speaking – both here in the south and on our trip to Maine.
• Wisdom and facility in preparing for our classes in Peru.  Joan is expected to teach in Spanish, so her preparation takes many hours.
• Nailing down other dates for other trips.  We are trying to schedule the Ivory Coast and some other countries this year.
• Please pray about our schedule.  Up until last week when Peru gave us dates, we had nothing definite on the calendar for overseas trips. We are excited about that opportunity.  We would still like three or four other trips this year.

Thank you for praying!

Joan and Charlie Farley