Happy Easter!
I hope that everyone had a fabulous Easter! While my night’s rest was cut short with an early rising it was a nice holiday. So I got ready in my Sunday’s best, grabbed the (possibly) disasterous cake pops and a bottle of wine and we headed for to catch a train to Long Island. Now, up until this point we hadn’t actually tried our cake pops, but I vowed that we’d try them on the train and if they were bad maybe we could just forget them on the train and never mention them again! We split one on the train though and sure enough they actually tasted pretty darn good! And they were pretty cute (forgot to take pic sorry!) so the frustrating night before ended up having a happy ending. Yay! I like happy endings!
And so about an hour and a half later we were getting off the train and headed for mass at the church Chris and his family grew up going to. The service we went to had an Easter-Egg hunt for the kids following mass so there was an extra number of children packed into the mass. Chris warned me that their priest sometimes thinks he’s a stand-up comedian, and he didn’t fail to impress. It was a really nice Easter mass speaking to the sacrifice and God’s love. He talked a lot about how today people are afraid to give all of their trust or faith and rather only take in small pieces. For example, he talked about how people can find any and every excuse to get out of going to church while we make rationalizations for other things in our life. He gave a funny example with this guy who told his wife he wasn’t going to mass that day because he didn’t like the priest, and the wife responded you don’t like the bartender, but you still go to the bar! I thought it was a funny comment anyways. It was a good point though that we find every reason to run away from faith and God and during a season of hope and renewal it ended on a nice message of striving to do better. Overall a nice sermon though!
After church we headed back to Chris’ family’s house for brunch complete with all 4 boys at home (which doesn’t happen that often I learned). It was a really nice brunch and it was nice to be taken in for a family function during a holiday I’d normally spend with my family back home! After brunch we got a little bit of a break before we headed over to Chris’ Aunt’s house for another round of eating for dinner! I cannot say I went hungry on Easter that is for sure! I finally got to meet a couple of people whose names come up in stories all the time, but I hadn’t actually met yet so it was nice to put a face to the name! One of his cousins and her husband also lived in Seattle for a couple of years while her husband worked at Microsoft so it was fun to talk to some people familiar with Washington! Chris’ aunt pulled out the photo albums too as soon as she knew I was from around Seattle and already agreed to jump on the next plane to Seattle when I go back to visit (Glad Seattle had a lasting impression on her!).
It truly was such a wonderful visit though and I’m so glad I was invited!