Easter Sunday

Easter started super early this morning, because the call time for us was 6am.  Of course, for Camille and Ivan, it was 3am, so I'm not complaining.  It was an early morning, but there was excitement in the air:  it was Resurrection Sunday, and we were ready to tell the greatest story ever told!

There's Maddie's face, projected on that scrim there.  It's a scene from the opening montage that shows people getting in place to see the arrival of Jesus on Palm Sunday, something we filmed a few weeks ago.  The scene with Maddie is fantastic, and you can see behind dancers getting ready on the scrim, and of course we're all getting ready to burst out from the audience, running forward with our palms to see Jesus ride in on an actual donkey.

So the production has been a great success.  Maddie came up to join us for a small picture after the production was over with.  Over the course of the last three days, we've had over 25,000 people see it in person, and of course online that number is even greater.  Here are a few more pictures below of our production, taken by our staff while the show was going on. 

 

It was an exhausting effort, but the 1,048 people that responded in person to the call for salvation made the work certainly worth it.  This was one of the better Easter productions we've created, completely original in design, and can only get better from here.

I imagine these sorts of productions are back at Free Chapel, something we'll see again this Christmas.  But for now, everyone was finished and getting their costumes and make-up off and going home to spend the afternoon with families, getting props and costumes gathered and eating up the last of the Last Supper bread and grapes.

There was a fantastic service upstairs in the main sanctuary, but there was also a fantastic morning at KidPak going on too!  Maddie was there with the Newsies for a great skit, today's being a special one because it featured just the younger cast members.  All the others were involved in the production upstairs.  They all did so great.  I wrote this thing just like I wrote the others, and they knocked it out of the park.  The Easter bunny made an appearance at KidPak too, and of course the big deal of the morning were all those Bibles that were handed out.  A very generous man gave out hundreds of free Bibles, all new and still in their wrapping, and every kid that came to KidPak this morning got a free Bible.

We got home and it was time to head out the door to go to Ye-Ye and Nana's house for Easter.  Before that though, I was able to give Mom her Easter basket, which you can see above.  That, my friends, is a Crunchie bar Easter egg.  It's a giant egg-shaped, hollow, Crunchie Bar.  I had no idea these things existed!  But to drive the point home, there are several Crunchie bars in the basket as well.  Oh, and some more Monkees banana nut soda, and a Wizard of Oz cherry soda as well.

Nana's basket had some marmalade in it, and some other British import candies.  We were munching on jelly beans all day, of course, and chocolate too.  We got over to Nana and Ye-Ye's house, and joined my sister and her family there for a nice meal together.  They had the ham there, and all kinds of other great things to eat.  It was short, and everyone was a bit zonked from the whirlwind holiday, but it was nice.  

So here's Maddie's Easter basket this year.  It's got a lot of candy in it she likes, but the Spider-Man movie was the great thing for her.  Of course, she didn't get the basket right away.  She had to follow a trail of Easter eggs with a story that started right here:

She followed a trail of Easter eggs that continued the story, and along the story she met Gingerbread Ant-man, Gingerbread Thanos, Gingerbread Captain America, Gingerbread Iron Man, Gingerbread Scarlet Witch, Gingerbread Hulk, Gingerbread Thor, Gingerbread Captain Marvel, and of course Gingerbread Spider-Man:

Maddie found within each egg a small photo that gave a hint as to where the next egg was located, and then followed the story inside and outside until she got to her basket, which we had placed in the living room.  Yes, she was happy to see that Spider-man movie, and of course, that's what we watched tonight before we went to bed.

It was a looooooong day.  But it was a good one, of course.  We got to sleep easily tonight, and at peace too.