Holy Week

This is the palm tree I planted on my patio yesterday, in anticipation of Palm Sunday today. It has been a wonderful day! I hope you are having a blessed Palm Sunday and anticipating Holy Week as well. We started this morning with breakfast as a family- coffee cake and fruit, with a lit candle on the table, which simply helps us remember that this is a special time. We attend church as a family on Saturday nights, so after breakfast my daughter and I were able to scoot over to Africa church and then go out to lunch together.

This morning we read about the Triumphal Entry in Mark's and Luke's gospels, noting especially how Luke's gospel details how Christ wept over Jerusalem... He was not exactly upbeat or giddy as He rode the donkey colt into the city to the chorus of "Hosanna!" He knew some who praised Him were not true disciples and in just a matter of days would be crying, "Crucify Him!"

Here are a few things we will be doing this week to observe Holy Week in our home... There are some simple (but powerful) readings developed by Noel Piper that we will be doing this week found here. These are in her book Treasuring God in Our Traditions, which is available to read online here. (I just love the Pipers! They make so many of their materials available for free. It's amazing!) We are going to hopefully make the "Easter Mountain" which is explained here in chapter 9 of the book.

During Christmas we read the first half of John Piper's Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ. I purposely stopped in the middle so we could finish it in the days leading up to Easter. It is available to read online here. I highly recommend it to read for yourself, or aloud to your older children. There is also a supplemental Bible reading plan to accompany the book, available here, that we will make use of as well. It's so helpful!

Friday night we will enjoy a time of fellowship with our Family Bible Fellowship (Sunday school class which we attend as a family) at our annual Passover Seder meal. If you don't have a group who does this or know of one you can attend, this site has some great recipes and explains it very thoroughly. Attending a Seder meal has always added meaning to our family's observance of Good Friday.

I would love to know some of the ways you make Holy Week a set-apart time for your family, and I'm always looking for new things to incorporate into our family's celebrations, so if you have some ideas or links, please let me know!

Have a blessed week!