Holy Week Days 1-4

Holy Week is our way to make Easter into a bigger deal than one day of baskets, bunnies and eggs. Christ was dead and He rose from the grave for crying out loud!  (That's Eben's new phrase. He says it all the time!) It's even more amazing than a baby being born in a stable, right? I know it's the same guy, but our culture has turned Christmas into a month long celebration, so I think Easter needs a little more emphasis in the right direction.

Holy Week 2012 was a blast. It really flew by. And since it's been almost a month since it happened I don't remember all of the details. But very important things happened on these days! Very exciting and wonderful things! So I'll post lots of pictures and write about the cool stuff.

Day 1- Palm Sunday

Praising the King

Sword drills. We do them every morning at devotions, so Holy Week was no exception. The bonus was that there was candy sometimes for the winner.

Praising the King with our WA version of palm branches - ferns!

Day 2 - Cleansing the Temple

Lake City Community, our church, was kind enough to let us borrow a really cool model of the temple, well, actually it's the tabernacle, but close enough. I loved playing with it!  The kids loved playing with it. It even has Aaron's staff, Moses' urn, and the Ten Commandments inside the Ark of the Covenant! 

That afternoon we went to see Grandma get baptized! Then we celebrated her birthday over at Uncle Chris and Uncle Tonya's house.

Day 3 - Questioning Jesus

This was an exciting day! All of the kids wrote down a question they would ask Jesus if He was standing in our family room for our Holy Week banner.

 "Jesus, will you help me obey?" Jasper

"How are you made God?" Kivi

"If nothing can come from nothing how did God appear?" Eben

"Will you come into my heart?" Opal

She's told me she's "blessed Jesus into her heart" many times before and then I fully explain what it means to have Jesus be the boss of our lives/ask Him to be our Savior, and how to asking Him into our hearts means we believe that Jesus is God's Son who had to come to earth to die on the cross so our sins could be taken away. Then I ask if she wants to pray with me to ask Jesus into her heart and she says, "No. Thanks." But this day. I asked again. And she said, "Yes, I really want to!" She was so cute and so excited.

So Opal became a Christian on Tuesday, April 3, 2012! And while we still have a lot of "training her up in the way she should go", we have seen so many changes in our little girl and a change of heart when it comes to obedience for sure. She's letting Jesus help her change and that's huge!

Day 4 - The Anointing of Jesus

I had grand plans to make this day work. It didn't go as planned, but it still worked. On our way to Costco, we stopped by the mall and I took the bigs and the middles into Nordstrom's to let them smell super expensive perfume, like the nard that Mary poured on Jesus this day.  They each got to pick 2 different perfumes to spray on a strip of paper to take home to our banner. They did really well! The sales lady let us test anything we wanted and we had the whole perfume section to ourselves.

Dada had his last day of all juice. After a couple of days he craved something savory and bought tons of V8 drinks. They had a little salt, but we deemed it worthy of the cause and worth a happy Dada. He was very excited to eat food again the next day.