40 days

This Lenten season has been 40 different days this year.    Last year on Maundy Thursday was Hannah's first communion on Maundy Thursday.  Last year, Audrey cheered on her sister as she took her first communion.

                                     


This Lenten season, our pastor made a devotional on lent as the 4 seasons.  For Fall, it referenced John 15:2 and the difficult work of letting go.
It's been hard, but out of all the seasons, I am working on pruning back the branches of my life.  Other things get in the way, and I have been working on cutting off branches of the fruit tree of our family.  There are alot of branches that get in the way of Hannah, Mandy and I celebrating Audrey and 

Last Easter was the last Easter we all had together on earth.
It does bring up some guilt, because I missed the Easter before, as I was out of town.  It was a short trip away, but it does make me really think about all the important things in life.  I have to prune back all the noise so the memories that I have are more fruitful.
If you have noticed, this post focused on just Audrey, Hannah, Mandy, God and I.  And in that pruning away of the other stuff, we focused on things like remembering Easter from 2021, when Audrey first showed her love of Sleeping Beauty.


To make the Easter memories of Dree more fruitful, we pruned away other activities (we didn't do the Easter bunny this year).  
We did do eggs, and all 24 this year were Dree's favorite things.


In dying those eggs, we remembered egg dying of year's past.
And this year, as we celebrated the resurrection at the end of 40 days of lent, I will still keep pruning back the branches of our lives so that the fruitful branches will be even more fruitful.





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