A BEAUTIFUL EASTER DAY

This day was pretty near perfect from my perspective. My family and I arose early at 6:30 a.m. in order to drive home from North Georgia, deposit our three dogs to our home, and still make it to our church for Easter morning worship...Quite an accomplishment, and so worth it! Our daughter just left to drive back to Auburn University, our son is playing catch up with his rest from his recent international mission trip and I was sitting here reminiscing about this day.
As we got settled into our pew, Billy and Missy scooted into the row in front of us. They are young parents, in fact, new parents of Sammie, just born on March 20, 2009. The service had not quite begun, so we had a minute to say hello and Missy told us that she reluctantly had taken Sammie to the nursery for the very first time...we assured her that all would be well and that it was good for she and Billy to have this time together to worship. The memories for me began to flood back to October 1988 when our first born was only a few weeks old and in the church nursery for the very first time. I remember feeling just like Missy, hesitant and a bit anxious. As the service neared the end, Missy slipped out and returned with a baby carrier with, you guessed it, newborn Sammie bundled inside of it. As the pastor closed the morning with prayer, I gazed at the tiny hands of this little girl. Where exactly had the past twenty years gone??? Following the service, Leah, our newborn baby girl (in 1988) came over to admire Sammie, the perfect example I can come up with to prove that Easter is truly a new beginning, especially when we stop long enough to consider all the new things popping up in our midst...the azaleas and dogwoods on the beautiful Masters'Golf Course, new baby birds, and YES, even a new season in our lives as 50 something women.