Skip to main content

Easter

Easter by stmatthews One of my favorite seasons is, without a doubt, turtleneck season. . .  but that's a story for another day.

In the church calendar, my favorite and most memorable time of year is Easter.  It's far, far better than Christmas in my book, but don't tell Santa that.

There's something about parading in with palms on Palm Sunday.  Growing up we paraded from a park about three blocks away.  It was sometimes cold (I remember the pond being frozen over one year) always exciting.

easter by stmatthewsAfter Palm Sunday we head into a week of, what can only be described as, silence.  The altar (that big table in the middle) is stripped bare and the church is empty.

At no time of the year is Jesus more on my mind than around Easter.  I think constantly about his life, his death, and that it means I get a free pass into heaven and a friend to hold my hand.

Then, Sunday and color!  From the flowers to the Easter eggs, the entire world comes alive.

easter by stmatthews This Easter was no different.  Heck, it was almost better because I took part in our sunrise service where we lit a huge fire in the middle of the woods and parade back into church.  Sounds dangerous, I know, but once the trees burn down to glowing embers, it's really quite beautiful.

All this is to say, we have pictures from our Easter service up on the Web site finally.  You should definitely check them out (there's even one of me).  I hope your Easter was a filled with color and life as mine is.

Peace,
+Tom

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using an Array of Objects in C++

 I've been programming for years (over 35 at this point, which is crazy  to think about). My career right now is much more Software Architecture, and much less Software Developer, but I still get some time to write out GraphQL APIs in TypeScript, Vue 3 UIs, GitLab pipelines, and just generally making "big" decisions and helping make them a reality. It's nice every now and then to come across different articles and ideas that get me to remember life in college when I was using C++. Who would have thought C++ was the "hot new thing" right now (though I suppose it's more like Rust and Go, both great languages as well). One of the things I find frustrating with most technical posts is where they focus on the "how do I build an app" and not so much on "how do I do this one slightly useful thing". I figured I'd throw one together what was front of mind, using user attributes for permissions (i.e., Attribute Based Access Control - ABAC) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Red-Gate SQL Compare

Every now and then I come across a program that becomes so ingrained in my daily work that I hardly know how I'd get by without it.  I'll probably break down a couple over the next few days, but for database work, I have never found anything as good as Red Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare .  Essentially these tools let you compare two SQL Server databases (all objects, users, permissions, functions, diagrams, anything) and update changes to whichever database you want.  This is amazingly useful for deploying database changes to a test or production environment (do it to production with ridiculous care, even though it will generate a SQL Script for you and run all updates in one transaction), and making sure everything is synchronized. For releases we can just generate the compare script, confirm that the changes match the updates we want to go out, and store it all in one place with the release details.  This is true for both the structure and the d...
6 comments
Read more

Kids Activities

I find myself often in a situation where it's some morning, I have the kids for the afternoon, and I'm not sure what to do with them. We could go to a movie, or play Legos, but living near Washington, DC, I want the kids to love the museums as much as I do, or to see what else is going on. This Sunday, while my wife was travelling, I took the kids to the Chocolate Festival in Old Town Fairfax. I didn't even know there wad an Old Town Fairfax, much less a chocolate festival. It was okay overall, but the best was seeing any type of chocolate you could imagine, and letting the kids pick something for themselves and their teacher. For finding cheap or free stuff going on nearby with the kids, I have to say About.com has consistently been the best. I tried si.edu (the Smithsonian Website) which is also good, but a little hard to navigate, partly because they have so much going on. At About I did a search of what to do with my kids this weekend, and a bunch of items came ...
Post a Comment
Read more