"All For Love"

Yesterday was Easter. I was at work. One of the great things about working in the medical field is that you get to spend holidays with everyone but your family. In my case, any holiday that falls on a weekend, I'm at the hospital. Of course Easter and Mother's and Father's day are always on a Sunday but this past Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Day all fell on the weekend. Oh well, there's always Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Anyway, since I wasn't home to see the kids through Easter, I got up at 4:00 am so I could hide their baskets and eggs. Easter was always my favorite holiday growing up because my mom would write "clues" to help us locate our impossible-to-find goodies. Once we discovered that bunnies don't lay eggs, it sort of took the fun out of it for mom so she created her own fun. We would wake up early Easter morning with a poetic rhyme pasted on our headboard that would read something like...."Good morning Sunshine, hope you're feeling fine, the day is just beginning and you're gonna be grinning cause the bunny is feeling funny and your first clue is where you keep your money!" I would then proceed to look in my purse (yes, I still insisted on this tradition when I was 18, what of it?) and there would be another clue and another verse and so on until the last clue would give the exact location of the Easter basket. My mother did this faithfully every year that I can remember for all 4 of us kids and we loved it!

Needless to say, I don't do it for my kids. It's not that I can't come up with phrases that rhyme, I just never seem to be able to find the time (see, I CAN do it). So I woke up at 4, got ready for work and hid the kids' gifts. They already had candy because Grinny and Papa came bearing Easter baskets early, so all they got from this Easter Bunny was a chocolate rabbit and some clothes. Where, oh, where is that creativity gene? At 6 am I was outside hiding plastic eggs filled with quarters and dollars (the kids never once asked to color eggs so I didn't volunteer). I left dh instructions to read the children the story of the resurrection in the Bible story book. I found out later that there was also a note from the Easter Bunny saying he had been at our house to see two good kids...... where do we come up with stuff?

Before going to work, I stopped at church for an Easter sunrise service. The music, the message, the feeling was amazing. The theme was "All For Love", that God gave us His son, and Jesus endured tremendous suffering out of love for us. What a gift, to be forgiven again and again because Jesus shed HIS blood for us! Love was the motivation for all Jesus did. When He was betrayed, Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends." It's never too late to open our hearts to His love and experience the joy that can only come from knowing Him.