Easter is almost here!
Since it falls a bit early this year, you might not have your usual prep work done for your family’s Easter celebration. But don’t panic. Just tell everybody to bring their favorite food, a dozen dyed or plastic, candy-stuffed eggs, and you’re good to go.
For our big family, the egg hunt is the high point of the day, with hundreds of plastic eggs (stuffed with change collected throughout the year) strewn throughout my sister’s backyard for kids and adults of all ages to find.
But before the annual frenzy of hunting begins, we also carry out another family tradition that my daughter-in-law added to our celebration a few years back – Resurrection Eggs.
This excerpt from a blog I wrote last year explains the joy of this tradition that you might want to add to your festivities as well. It starts with all our children sitting down together while one of the older kids tells the Easter story from the Bible, using the Resurrection Egg story kit:
One by one, the kids chose one of the brightly colored plastic eggs from the kit. But by the time our youngest member got to choose his egg, all that was left was the white one. He was not the least bit deterred. In fact, he was just thrilled to be a part of the celebration. (There’s a BIG lesson there too!)
We all listened as the biblical account of Christ was told, moment by moment, beginning with Jesus riding into the city on a donkey to the shouts of welcome and palm branches strewn before Him. And as the story progressed, each child opened his specified egg to illustrate the lesson with 11 tiny trinkets.
We saw the young donkey, the palm branches, the cup, the coins, the whip, the nails, the crown of thrones, the cross, the tombstone, and other symbols of the resurrection story. Each child sat still and enraptured, waiting for their cue, even the youngest little guy.
Then, the story came down to the part where the angel rolled the stone away. And my granddaughter Ella paused in her reading to prepare her tiny cousin for the dramatic climax, “Alright, Trace, you’re next. Get ready!”
Trace sat up straight and tall, holding his plain white egg and waiting for her command.
She read the ending Scripture with purpose and passion, “And an angel told them, ‘Jesus is not here. He is risen!’”
But Trace needed no further cue. He opened his egg and triumphantly held it up for all to see while shouting with pure joy, “It’s empty!”
Needless to say, his precious smile and innocent exuberance brought us all to tears. And just as the Bible promised, a little child led us – straight to that empty tomb, reminding us of the greatest lesson of all from the greatest love story ever told.
