Happy Easter! Joyeux Paques!

Here is a picture of us at Quisqueya Chapel, the English church near us. We love what they do every

Easter. They put up a cross during lent and the people of the congregation write on a piece of paper something they are "sacrificing" or a sin they are asking God to remove. Then they put the paper on the cross (it has chicken wire all over it). The papers are burned on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, as we walk into church, one of the kids hands us each a flower which we put on the cross to celebrate what Jesus has done.

After church we went to a friends' house for coffee and Easter treats and a nice visit.

We had David and Phyllis Schmid (of CrossWorld) over for a nice Easter dinner. It was great being with them--we really haven't had much of a chance to visit with them since Thanksgiving!.

Here are the beautiful Easter eggs we colored on Thursday. The sad story of these eggs is... I tried to do my usual 3 things at once, so the job dragged on for most of the day.

Then I got involved in the last minute preparations for Passover. AFter the Passover Seder, I collapsed on my bed and fell right to sleep. The next day I forgot to put the eggs in the fridge. So, we started smell something bad. Throughout the day I kept saying things like, "We have to take the trash out, it stinks." Finally at the end of the day, Joy realized it was the boiled eggs. Eeewww what a stink, by then! It's possible that one of them was a bad egg to begin with. We've been buying our eggs from a lady that we pass on the way home, like many other foreigners do, and we always break them into a bowl to check them before we use them and often we find a bad one. Well, I've learned my lessons--just pay the $4 to buy eggs in the supermarket for Easter and don't forget to put them in the fridge!

We had better "blessings" with the chocolate covered eggs --another of our family traditions.

Passover 2007

Well, we celebrated our traditional "Christ in the Passover Seder" last night. We were glad we hadn't invited too many people over because Richard had a bad cold this week. It's hard for him to slow down when he gets sick (sometimes it seems like everything's hard in this country). I didn't expect it, be he managed to get us a lamb shoulder so we could have a lamb bone for our seder plate. So, yesterday I had off from teaching and Richard got to take a 4 hour nap. And, then, as you can see "Rabbi Richard" was in fine shape for the seder.

Our friends Kerline and Lesly came over for their first Passover celebration. They enjoyed it....Even if it doesn't look that way in the pictures! :)
By the time we realized that Joy wasn't in any of the pictures, our batteries wore out. I have to get copies of Kerline's pictures to show that Joy was there. :)

Some of you have heard me say that it seems like every year when I prepare for Passover, God shows me something new...well, it happened again this year! I was reading an old booklet that we had in our stuff packed away in Haiti called "The Meaning and Importance of the Jewish Holidays" and I found 2 new things. First, I learned that in the time of Jesus, people went to the temple in Jerusalem to get a lamb for Passover and when they did, the priest would indicate an appropriate (without defect) lamb by pointing to the animal and saying "Behold the lamb." Isn't that amazing since, when John the Baptizer pointed to Jesus he said "Behold the lamb...the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?"
The second thing was that the word "Afikomen" is actually a Greek word and that the tradition of hiding the afikomen began after Jesus died for us. Afikomen means "the one who came." That makes a lot of sense for those of us who believe Jesus is the Messiah because the Afikomen is the "middle matzah" that is taken from the matzah plate, which has three matzah, one on top of each other, broken (like the Messiah who was "crushed for our iniquities" Is 53:5) then wrapped in linen and hidden away until the children joyfully find it (reminding us of Jesus dying, being wrapped in linen and being found alive on the third day).
I really didn't expect to learn new things about Passover this year because we've been celebrating it for more than 10 years now...hmmmm....or maybe I'm so old I forget stuff and then learn it again! Well, if that's the case, just think of what a happy old lady I'll be going around saying "Guess what? I learned something new today!"

Christmas in Haiti 2006

It was great having Grace here for Christmas. Here are a couple pictures showing our traditional breakfast of shaped pancakes. This year we had a special pancake-shaper given to us by "Aunt Judith" and a picture of us having Christmas Dinner.