{"id":179,"date":"2019-04-08T22:36:12","date_gmt":"2019-04-08T22:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/?p=179"},"modified":"2019-04-08T22:36:12","modified_gmt":"2019-04-08T22:36:12","slug":"easter-the-main-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/?p=179","title":{"rendered":"Easter – The Main Event"},"content":{"rendered":"

Easter is coming! I can\u2019t believe it\u2019s almost here! Especially after that 8 week long January and 6 week long February and now all the sudden March was only three weeks\u2026.and BAM! Spring break and Easter are around the corner. Life is weird. 2019 is officially on a roll and then, before you know it, it\u2019ll be Fall (pumpkin spice lattes! Eeeek!) and then, the main event, Christmas! Or is that the main event?<\/p>\n

Ya’all, I am a Christmas lover! Through and through! For me, that is the culmination of the whole year! Christmas means Christ\u2019s birth, that a savior has come to the world due to the great love of our creative Father to reconcile us to Himself (Luke 2)! And due to this, year after year, we end our calendar celebrating with friends and family, cozy decor, gifts that show our love for one another and so much more! What better way to close out a year than to put all our perspectives and priorities straight. I truly love Christmas.<\/p>\n

But is it really the main event? Christ\u2019s birth is certainly a big deal. But, really, it points to what\u2019s coming down the road! The main event is when He lays down His life to reconcile us all to Him and the Father! This is where life begins! Real life! This is where hope is born and fear dies! This is where death, the whole idea and reality of it, loses it\u2019s sting (1 Corinthians 15:54-55)! Imagine an angry bee coming in for the sting zooming right toward you with the nastiest smirk on his face, then he comes in close makes contact with your skin and as you grimace and brace yourself, it\u2019s just a little \u201cboop\u201d. Every muscle in your body relaxes realizing no real threat has occurred and you burst into giggles with the relief and hilarity of it all! The bee bumbles off humiliated and defeated. THAT is what it\u2019s like when death comes for those whose life is in Christ. DEATH HAS NO STING.<\/b><\/p>\n

The reason this is all on my mind is even though I already knew and realized all of this, I recently had a mini wake up call. Isn\u2019t it funny how easily the daily ins and outs of life can distract us from our firmly held beliefs? I work at a decent sized church that last year put on a pretty good Easter Egg hunt. This year, I was surprised to learn that for at least this year, we\u2019re nixing it.<\/p>\n

The immediate response to such news would be \u201cbut we had such a good turn out? Isn\u2019t the point that we get these people into the church?\u201d Well, of course. However, the reason not to do it was a real perspective shift and priority adjustment\u2026at least for me.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

Why We Won\u2019t Have an Easter Egg Hunt this Year<\/b><\/p>\n

So many wonderful organizations in our community put on hunts too. Therefore, are we really meeting a need? That being said, all the time, money, and resources that go into putting on an egg hunt is a big deal! What we began to wonder is \u201care our kids seeing that we make a big deal out of our hunt and then when Easter hits, we\u2019re just mentioning Jesus? The way one of our team member\u2019s put it is profound, “We don\u2019t want kids to love the egg and like Jesus\u201d.<\/p>\n

Egg hunts are usually done with the purpose of bringing new kids in. Our church has no trouble seeing new young faces every week in the Kid\u2019s Department. That being said, with the\u00a0statistics that most family\u2019s only come to church once or twice a month,<\/a>\u00a0we aren\u2019t even necessarily seeing the new faces that come, consistently. We get tons of new kiddos every week but the overall attendance numbers stay about the same. What does that tell us? That we need to monopolize on the kiddos that do come when they\u2019re there and tell them how amazing Jesus is!<\/p>\n

Therefore, although Easter Egg Hunts are always a good time. For this year, we\u2019re gonna try something new. We\u2019re gonna make Easter Services the big blow out they ought to be! We are gonna go so big that families leave church that weekend with no doubt in their mind that Christ rising from the dead is Easter, and it\u2019s a BIG deal (1 Corinthians 15:3-5). Easter at our church will be a Par-Tay!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m excited about how this might go. Maybe it\u2019ll fail\u2026but hey, everything\u2019s an experiment. If nothing else, this whole idea turned a light bulb on for me. I\u2019m reminded that Jesus rising from the dead is Easter, and it\u2019s a BIG deal!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Easter is coming! I can\u2019t believe it\u2019s almost here! Especially after that 8 week long January and 6 week long February and now all the sudden March was only three weeks\u2026.and BAM! Spring break and Easter are around the corner. Life is weird. 2019 is officially on a roll and then, before you know it,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pac8FG-2T","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asmymindunwinds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}