As a christian educator, we teach the Christmas story and Easter story every year. To keep it fresh and exciting this teacher tries to learn something new every year. This year I learned…

1. Thanks to a message shared at Children’s Pastor’s Conference by Beth Guckenberger, we must be ready with a tambourine and a dance when God rescues and leads us to something different.
As told in Exodus 15, Miriam has rushed to pack what she can carry along with all the Israelites leaving Egypt. Of everything she could have taken, “a tambourine made the backpack.” She is led from all she knows to the unknown, yet she is ready to sing and dance before the Lord. Thanks to a great friend, I am now packing a tambourine in my purse. You never know when a song and a dance is just what is needed.

2. The visual art of history makes a literal stamp upon the mind and heart for Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.
Reading James Bryan Smith’s “The Kingdom and the Cross”, he challenges the reader to build in margin during the season of Lent to look at sculpture, ancient cathedral drawings, watch a couple of movies, and visually add to the biblical texts of the Easter story. Profound for this visual learner.

3. Building in margin in my daily walk with Christ, has helped me be fully present rather than run around like a baby chick looking for what is next.
Taking a season with other women of faith, we are taking The Apprentice Series together. We gather monthly around my kitchen table to speak of our strolls through the scriptures, building in habits of sleep, solitude, margin, the 23rd Psalm, counting/listing our blessings, lectio divina, and reading the Gospel of John along the way. Holy habits of Christ, we are experiencing in our own lives.

4. Bunny Ear headbands are the “candy” of youth.
Our youth have taken an active role in “hoppin’ in” to lead the little ones in their faith. On Easter Sunday, after they prepared Hygiene Kits for a Honduras mission trip, they made and placed fish hook bracelets on little people, and themselves, to begin praying about where God wants each of them to “go into the world and preach the good news to all creation.” Seeing a young man in his formal suit AND a pair of bunny ears in the sound booth made me and the little people during services smile. This same young man served on Easter Sunday from the sunrise service through the last one of the day.  Looks like I’ll be shopping for headbands where ever I go.

What did you learn this Easter?

“Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women followed her, with tambourines and dancing.”  Exodus 15:20