Easter debrief before moving on

Easter was exhausting.

Probably less so for me, though, than it was for Jesus.

(Just keepin' some perspective.)

We had an incredibly busy end to Holy Week. Our sanctuary carpet/ remodelling thing was finished on Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday evening we had our final Soup for the Soul service, then went to church to set up for Maundy Thursday's dinner. I was there til about 9:30 p.m. Thursday's dinner was lovely -- sparsely attended, but lovely. Once again, I was there far too late and got home about 10. Friday, Dennis got up and went to church at 7:45 a.m. to help set up the sound system. We joined him at about 9:30, then I had a service at noon, went back to church at 1 and he met me at 2 with the kids to finish the sound system. We all left about 6:30 p.m. Saturday we spent the entire morning and early afternoon there and then I came back in the evening. I was hot-gluing moss to the top of Easter centerpieces in the fellowship hall at 9:15 p.m. when it occurred to me that things had gotten out of hand.

Easter morning, Dennis and I were in charge of Easter breakfast, somehow, and mangaed to get to church, with the family in our finery about 3 minutes after we had planned to be there. I also ended up being in charge of Sunday School, though thankfully, I was able to just hand the craft and instructions to another adult and have them supervise the kids as they ate breakfast. Then we debuted the new sanctuary during worship and had a great crowd -- almost twice what we have been averaging in these winter months! It was a great service and, I think, most people ended up leaving happy.

We had planned to go out for Easter brunch with friends, but other friends cancelled and so on and so forth, so we ended up having brunch here. We got home about noon and our friends and Dennis' mom came over and because of shoddy planning on my part, we didn't eat until 1:30 p.m., which is exactly when we would have been eating had we gone out to eat. Oh well. It was good and everything that was supposed to be hot, was, in fact, hot. Except the asparagus, which was sort of lukewarm.

And when the friends and Dennis' mom had left and Daniel was asleep and Annalivia was having some quiet time, the dishes were washed, the nice clothes were shed, and we had vegged out in front of our laptops, I laid down with Daniel to get him back to sleep and ended up taking a two-hour nap with him. It was lovely.

And so was the weekend. It is exhausting, but in one sense, I truly love the activity involved in this special time. There is something about making these celebrations as significant and precious as possible that is just very fulfilling for me. Fulfilling at the same time it is energy-depleting. I think I will probably feel different at some point in my life, but for now, this is good.

Today has been a day of recovery. I am enjoying doing almost nothing.

Tomorrow, we'll move on.