This year we also got to experience 2 different Good Friday services. I went to the first ever GF service at our church and they did over 50 baptisms! It was wonderful!!!! Chris got to join our neighbors at their Byzantine Orthodox Catholic Church which was a somber liturgy fitting for Good Friday. Very different but both good preparation for the enormously significant celebration of Easter.
Thanks also to our neighbors we learned the true origins of dyeing Easter eggs! Ironically, 30 minutes before we learned about this, we had JUST made up our own loose connection between eggs and new life and Jesus to explain to the kids why we were dyeing eggs. So, the real story is that way back in the day when Christians were proselytizing they came to pagan villages and as a way to effectively communicate about Christ, they'd learn some of the cultural rituals and weave the bible into them. So, when people used eggs as a symbol to celebrate new life in spring, the Christians began to decorate the eggs with Christian messages, concepts to communicate in a way that was already part of the people's culture. Our engines have books full of the elaborate designs and what they mean (every picture has deep symbolism) AND our neighbor Chuck has eggs he's painted that look like they should be in a museum! They're amazing and done with special tools and layers of wax on RAW, fragile eggs that had then blows out when the design in complete. Really impressive. So blessed to have our Easter enriched by new friends this year!
