On This Good Friday

original art work by Fox and Pebble Design Studio

The morning is quiet, which is kind of my favorite thing. There’s no school today and while I have a million + one things to do, I’m not rushing. Maybe it’s because that list of to-do’s is mostly things I don’t really want to do. So here I am, soaking in the quiet, laminating my eye brows 😆 (is there an eye brow emoji yet?), listening to the doves coo outside my window and doing something I actually love to do — organizing some of my thoughts this week to write down.

It’s Good Friday today. We’ve been doing the “Because of Him” short lessons each morning this week rather than my usual short devotionals of the last week of Jesus’ mortal life. It’s all getting talked about but I’ve appreciated the thoughtful questions, discussions, and videos this week that have come from the “Because of Him” outline.

Normally, I decorate the house early, plan for egg dying and decorating sugar cookies, curating a basket for each kid for Easter morning, but life has been so much more busy and stressful than normal with our move to Germany just weeks away. My head hit the pillow a few days ago and I confessed to Matt that I hoped the kids wouldn’t notice. But, as it would happen, yesterday when I picked up my two elementary school kids after school, they said, “Hey, when is our dinner on the floor and coloring eggs? What about cookies?" They totally called my bluff.

Matt laughed and laughed and I knew I would do it...well, some of it.

Dinner on the floor is our most-requested and most-loved, and most-important Easter tradition we do as a family. Years…no decades now!…ago when I lived in Jerusalem, I loved participating in the Passover, Seder, dinner with our Jewish professors and friends. It gave me a deeper appreciation for the beauty of traditions and how they connect us to deep meaning in our relationship with God. As a young mom I new I wanted to share this tradition with my kids in a way that combined our beliefs about Jesus Christ and this Holy Week leading up to Easter.

I laid out a table cloth on our tile floor in our first New Mexico home, strapped the baby into the booster seat, and carefully walked through each part of the Seder meal. It didn’t belong to me though. What I really wanted to focus on was what Jesus did that last night with His apostles and why it matters to us now. It’s become our favorite tradition. For the kids, it’s the novelty of eating a whole meal with our hands on the floor, and for me the connection of something deeply significant with the people I love the most, and the fun.

Here’s what I do now. The kitchen table and chairs get pushed aside and I put down a picnic blanket. I lay out a basin of water and a hand towel, some unleavened bread (usually pita), and a beautiful cup too for us to talk about Jesus washing His apostle’s feet and the first sacrament He began with them. We’ve eaten different meals over the years but my favorite is just a simple charcuterie board. I light candles, and we sing a hymn together, read/talk about the story from the New Testament (Matthew 26, John 13), and read “The Living Christ.” I’ve always tried to do this tradition on Thursday to stay accurate to the timeline, but we’ve pushed it to Friday to accommodate schedules and I kind of like that better. I’ve learned over the years that I have to be flexible and sometimes this dinner is short and sweet, and sometimes we linger and I love it when we do.

Tomorrow we will meet with friends and neighbors at the park for an egg hunt, and Sunday I gift each kid a fun Easter basket with a few treats and gifts from mom and dad.

Dinner on the floor, 2018.

So, that is what I get to busy myself with today! It’s a welcome break from coordinating with pet shippers, correcting medical documents, and prepping the house for moving.

I’ll leave you with this, because this is what I always think of on Good Friday. I came across a thoughtful post this week on Instagram that reminded me of this. It’s one of my favorite quotes of beautifully expressed truths shared by Joseph B. Wirthlin back in 2006 in a General Conference address, “Sunday Will Come.”

Each of us will have our own Fridays—those days when the universe itself seems shattered and the shards of our world lie littered about us in pieces. We all will experience those broken times when it seems we can never be put together again. We will all have our Fridays.

But I testify to you in the name of the One who conquered death—Sunday will come. In the darkness of our sorrow, Sunday will come.

No matter our desperation, no matter our grief, Sunday will come. In this life or the next, Sunday will come.

Happy Easter, friends!

love,

dayna

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