Sunday Morning Worship Prep., Intro

I (Betsy) have thought a lot about how to prepare for Sunday morning worship over the past few years. I mean preparation both practically speaking and personally speaking. As each new phase of life occurs (marriage, new baby, etc.), the Sunday morning routine gets tweaked. I'm going to throw some ideas out over the next few weeks that have helped my family and me get to church both on time and in a right frame of mind, but first I want to begin by sharing about our Easter Sunday morning.

Of all Sunday mornings to be prepared, Easter Sunday morning is it! So, nothing daunted, I carefully ironed all our Easter outfits ahead of time, packed the diaper bag with extra changes of clothes, planned a quick-but-substantial breakfast and had it ready ahead of time, and made sure everyone had baths/showers the day/night before. We did make it to church on time and in reasonably good moods; I even had my Sunday school lesson ready. However, Easter morning did NOT go as planned.

First, we woke up to a cold morning. I checked the forecast to see what the temperature by noon would be like. Hmmm... was going to be in the 40's until mid-afternoon. Backup (warmer) outfits were pulled out; incidentally these were the backups in the diaper bag, so now there were no backup clothes in the diaper bag in case of accidents at church. Daddy had breakfast supervision duty while I tried on several outfits, hunting for a suitable, warm Eastery outfit. Daddy fell asleep on the couch, and he woke up to the sight of our large dogs polishing off the kids' breakfast. We still have no idea how much the kids actually consumed. We finally made it to the car and to church on time; we forgot: snacks for the way home (we live 40 minutes from church, so snacks for the way home go a long way...), burp cloths for the boys for nursery (one of them threw up several times during nursery that morning), backup outfits in case the "potty trained" toddler had an accident or boys threw up/peed on themselves (one boy came home with no socks), .....

As I ran around the house that morning, fuming and fussing at everyone in my way while I tried to make everything "picture perfect," I had to remind myself of some of the things I'll be sharing with you in the coming weeks. So, stay tuned!