Isn’t it strange how so much can be turned on its head, and still, so much can remain the same? How these average things that go on and on can be so simple and yet so deep?
I don’t know about you, but I’m still cooking three meals a day. The laundry is still a daily habit, too— only now it’s clothesline weather, so I get to hike that heavy basket of wet clothes onto my hip and step out into the sun to perform the age old ritual of hanging things out to dry. Bathrooms need their morning and evening wipe down. Chickens need to be fed. Homeschooling goes on, just as it always has.
My days feel at once strangely out of joint but also comfortingly familiar. I suspect I’m not alone in that.
I came into Holy Week unsure how to make this time special for my family. It’s a strictly religious holiday for us, so we’re not sad to be missing out on bunnies or baskets or egg hunts. But we are connected to the greater global church by only the thinnest threads of technology at this point. There will be no paschal greetings on Resurrection Sunday except the ones we offer one another. The only swell of voices I will hear around me as I tear up during “In Christ Alone” —because I always tear up during “In Christ Alone”—will be those of my family. And all of this is o.k…. but also more than a little sad. Easter is the celebration of our year. We look forward to sharing it with a larger body of believers. But this year, it is a purely familial pursuit.
The rest of this week? Well, I suspect it will look the same as its beginning, right up until Good Friday. I’ve had requests for blueberry scones for breakfast one day, and peaches and oatmeal another. We’re in the midst of a lovely little unit study on spring in Appalachia, and it comes with its own baking project: an old fashioned stack cake. Birdie and Simon are learning to play the fiddle tune “Cripple Creek,” and I think they might just get those parts together this week. We have an escape room game planned for one evening. We’re planning on butchering a duck for our big spread Easter Sunday. I’m planning on starting a new read-aloud with the younger kids. I haven’t been knitting much (I never do as the weather grows warm) but I suppose I will join the rest of the sewing nation in turning a portion of my fabric stash into cloth masks. I have a pile of clothes they need to be sorted from our seasonal change over.
Writing it out, my life looks very plain. And it is. There’s nothing special about it at all, especially these days. But this week, especially, I am striving to see and feel the sanctification in it, the provision God has set about me. I’m blessed to do all of these very ordinary things. His Holiness, His grace… it is here.