Tag Archives: Easter

Easter Monday

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Day Sixteen

Easter Monday is a more important holiday than Easter Sunday here in Italy.  Why?  I haven’t got a clue.  Maybe somebody out there knows and can enlighten me.  Anyway, Easter Monday this year falls on the most important kid holiday of the year: April Fools Day.  I always loved the idea of April Fools Day.  On this day you get full license to say or do something completely outrageous and silly, and then avoid any consequences just by saying, “April Fool!”

By the same token, you’ve got to be on your guard because someone else can make an April Fool out of you.  I always hated being caught off-guard by an April Fool joke.  I liked to come up with something from school: “Hey, Mom!  I need to take an extra cookie in my lunch tomorrow.  It’s Bring a Cookie for the Teacher Day.”  Really, I just wanted to see if I could get an extra cookie out of her.  She never fell for it.

My family was very competitive.  We played for glory to the winner and humiliation to the loser.  To fool a friend was fun, but to fool a family member was something to celebrate.  To be taken-in by my little brother was the ultimate humiliation.

Being older, I had the advantage of experience, but once my brother figured out my Achilles Heel, I was forever doomed to be the butt of his April Fool pranks.  That weakness: spiders.  Sometime around age 9 he learned that all he had to do was scream “SPIDER!!!” and I would jump up, screaming.  A couple of times he backed it up with a plastic spider saved from last Halloween.

No April Fool joke of mine ever even approached the success of the spider prank.  Mom even got in on it, pinning a fake spider to her shirt, then pretending to try and brush it off right over me.  I nearly overturned the table trying to get away.  Daddy would focus his eyes on my shoulder and simply whisper, “Don’t move.”  Of course that sent me screaming from the room.

I Skyped with Mom today, and while we were talking my brother called.  I wish I could say that I’m no longer afraid of spiders, but that’s just not true.  But from the safe distance of a few thousand miles, the spider prank has lost all of its power.  Neither of them even mentioned April Fools Day.  In some aspects growing up stinks, but at least there are no more fake spiders to deal with.

The Breathless Anticipation of Easter Saturday

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Day Fourteen

There is something so beautiful about waiting.  Hey!  I can’t believe I wrote that!  If you read my first book, Look, Listen, Love, I go on for several chapters lamenting the wait for my camper van to be ready.  But really, when you think of it, it’s true.  When you’re waiting for something good—something that is certain to happen—you start to actually enjoy it in the period of anticipation.  Your imagination begins to take hold of the idea, imagining how you will have it in your hands.

Pregnancy is one of those times.  You start to imagine what it will be like to finally hold that baby in your arms, to feel the softness of the baby’s skin on your cheek, to smell the fresh smell of the baby after his or her bath.  I didn’t want to know the sex of my babies before they were born.  That’s like peeking at your Christmas presents a week before Christmas.  Once I did peek at a Christmas present that wasn’t well wrapped.  On Christmas morning all the fun and surprise was gone for that particular gift.  I’ve never understood people who peek or who ask the baby’s sex.

I imagine the disciples on Easter Saturday.  What a sad day for them!  Jesus had repeatedly assured them that He would rise on the 3rd day.  They had seen Him raise people from the dead, but they were so stuck in their old mindset that they couldn’t imagine the resurrection.  Instead of enjoying the anticipation of Easter Sunday, they were fixated on Crucifixion Friday and their sorrow and loss.

For me, this time of waiting, fasting, and praying for my answer is a time of breathless anticipation.  Unlike the disciples, I have the sure and certain hope of getting the answer.  So instead of mourning my loss (in this case, solid food), I am getting ready to receive my answer.  Today begins the last week of my fast, and I am so excited that I can hardly stand it.  I do feel like a child the week before Christmas or a mother in the last month of pregnancy.  My answer will come, and I am thoroughly enjoying the wait.  God is good!