Grace of Christ's Easter Celebration

We had a great turn out for our Easter outreach with Grace of Christ Church yesterday!  It was a great time of fellowship, food, and sharing of the Word!  We had almost 50 people attend, which was great!  We had many friends join us for this special celebration.  

We enjoyed some Russian food...

Brian shared a short message about the meaning of Easer...

Lena, one of the team leaders on our leadership team, read a poem about Easter.  We also shared in some meaningful worship songs.

The children played a game and did a version of Resurrection Eggs.  Gwen enjoyed the game as you can see!

 

 

Of course the babies were passed around and the children found adults to entertain them!

We had Anya and her family join us, which was really fun!  Anya is the woman who's English Club Philip helps out with each Thursday.  Hopefully this week Anya and I can get together with the kids!  It was great to meet her husband and daughter!

Thanks for your prayers and continual interest and investment in our lives and the ministry here in Russia!

Blessings,

Philip, Kara, Adalynn, and Gwen

Пасxa

Did you know that we have not celebrated Easter here in Russia yet? Actually we did celebrate with our family last weekend, but Russian Easter is this coming week (tomorrow). Easter is the biggest religious holiday here in Russia. Since Russia follows the Julian calendar, Easter falls on a different day than in America.  

Easter is a big and fun celebration for many Russians, both Protestant and Orthodox. They do color eggs here, but the tradition is to use onion skins.  They boil the onion skins and turn the eggs a brownish color.  (see picture of eggs on the plate below)  We opted to use food coloring because I wasn't up to boiling onion skins...this year--maybe next year!  They also sell these cakes that are pretty popular.  Usually they aren't very sweet, but more like bread.  Sometimes there are raisins in them...yuck, um no thank you.  I decided to buy some to try to make...of course I decided to buy the sweet kind!  

They turned out pretty good.  I even read the directions in Russian...but of course double checked everything to make sure I was reading correctly. Basically you just mixed in 2 eggs and 100grams of butter and put them in the oven.  I made some for some friends we will be seeing tomorrow as we celebrate Easter (Пасха).  Of course I tasted it, just to make sure it was worthy of giving as a gift.  No worries, it was!

Our neighbor, who likes to occasionally pound on our door and come right in our house, brought us an Easter cake this afternoon!  We were thrilled to receive the kind gesture.  We chatted in our kitchen for a few minutes.  Adalynn was eating chips (which was actually a treat at the end of her lunch) and our neighbor was telling us how unhealthy they are for kids.  Great, she is probably thinking, "Those fat Americans!"  Hahah!  

As you can see Gwen was all about the hard boiled eggs.  And no, the cake did not fall off the plate despite what the picture may look like!

Христос Воскрес!  Воистину Воскрес! 

(Christ is Risen!  He is risen indeed!)

Above is the greetings you exchange on Easter!  I think I like it better than Happy Easter!

Blessings,

Philip, Kara, Adalynn, and Gwen

Please pray for our outreach tomorrow afternoon!  Our church is having a dinner/tea!  We have invited many people!  Our friend, Anya and her family are coming, so we are really excited to share this special day with them!