Not Your Typical Easter Dinner!

It's unbelievable that Easter Sunday has come and gone!

Easter is one of those holidays that we can become homesick, because we miss the traditional American Christian/Evangelical church celebrations -- Easter Sunrise services, church cantatas, classic Easter hymns (such as "He Arose").

And then there's Easter dinner - ham, potatoes, green beans, eating too much, as though we didn't learn our lesson from Thanksgiving and Christmas family dinners!

When we first came to Colombia, and we realized Easter wouldn't be "typical" for us, not just in the church service, but also around the dinner table, we decided to make it feel as close to "home" as possible.  Colombians do not typically eat ham they way we Americans (or at least Iowans) do.  The best I could do for a ham was to buy a four-inch slice (or "chunk") of ham lunchmeat from the deli counter.  I would wrap it in foil and put it in the crockpot, along with three potatoes, and then fix a quick vegetable when we got home from church.  This was becoming our "typical" Easter dinner.

But this past weekend, it didn't turn out that way.

Kevin was scheduled to preach two services Easter Sunday morning.  Because we'd had a busy week of ministry with visiting US pastors, he'd not had a lot of time to prepare for the sermon.  Saturday, therefore, was spent mostly studying and preparing.  Between needing to give him the time to do that, and the very rainy day we were having, we decided rather than going to the store to buy the "chunk" of ham, we'd just go out for lunch.  After all, who said you had to have the typical Easter dinner at home?!

Resurrection Sunday finally came!  Kevin preached an awesome message, with many people responding at the altar, including several first-time salvation commitments.  After the second service, we discussed where we would go for lunch.  Trying to think of something "different," rather than our normal favorites, we decided upon one of our pizza favorites (for those of you who know us really, really well, you know that pizza is always a hit and a unanimous decision in our family!). 

So our Easter Sunday dinner ended up being 1969 Pizza ... with ham!

I got to thinking later that day how "untypical" our Easter Day had been, but then I realized...

When God raised Jesus from the grave, it became an "untypical" day, not only in Jerusalem on that first Easter Sunday, but also on the Christian calendar.  I realized that God doesn't want me to have a "typical" Easter Sunday, or any Sunday for that matter!

Every Sunday should be a day to celebrate Christ's resurrection power, Christ's healing power, Christ's saving power, Christ's delivering power, all as a result of that first Resurrection Sunday over 2,000 years ago.

So next year, I don't expect we will have a "typical" Easter, but that's okay!