easter weekend 2019.

Easter weekend is my favorite weekend of the year with our church. We had such a great time that it took me a whole week to recover and share about it here on the blog.

We like to make the weekend feel sort of like an at-home retreat by having the Good Friday evening service, a Saturday egg hunt and cook-out, and then services Easter morning with brunch served in between.

This year we added in serving lunch for one of the ministries our church partners with, Providence Home, Friday, so we got the fun of hanging out together there too.

The cook-out on Saturday afternoon was one of those moments of looking out over our midst with a full heart, realizing that interspersed with church members were friends from Providence Home, the family our church sponsored to immigrate to Columbia from Africa, at-risk kids and teen moms who are being mentored.

We don’t do all of these ministries as a church to prove we’re good people or to earn points with God; we do them with hearts overflowing with the grace and forgiveness each of us has experienced. We do it because we’re told to love people who are like us and people who are different from us, because we need to learn from each other.

And at the cook-out, I gave thanks, because the more we practice this the more the lines become blurred between what’s ministry and what’s just friendship, between serving and simply being a family.

I think that’s the gospel.

 

Thursday Passover Seder dinner

 

 

 

 

Cook-Out at Providence House

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easter Egg hunt and Cook-Out at Saluda Shoals Park

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Resurrection Sunday

 

 

 

This was my favorite Easter Sunday, because two women in our church and in our most recent New Members class gave their lives to Christ this spring. One shared her story in the 9:00 am service and one in the 10:30, and they were both baptized. We all rejoiced together that God is still actively seeking and saving those who are lost, and that He’s allowed CPC to have a small part in His great story of redemption.

What better way to celebrate the Resurrection?