Per typical I’m late posting on what we do here at the parsonage! We celebrated All Saints Day a couple weekends ago. We did this over two days. I’m finding that with the bigger feasts of the Church Year spreading out the lessons or activities or meals I have planned makes for way less stress.
We really didn’t do a lot; colored some, talked about dying and those we have known who have gone on to be with Jesus, wore white, lit candles and “feasted” AKA had lunch.
I really like what Emily suggested on her blog, keeping an All Saints notebook with God’s promises, Scripture verses or quotes to refer to each year, each day and in those times when we will desperately need them.
Here is a quote I would add to mine:
“Christians certainly have the greatest blessings of all awaiting them in the future. However, these are attained only through sufferings and death. They surely also rejoice in that common and uncertain hope that the evil of the present will come to an end and that its opposite, the blessing, will increase, but this is not their chief concern.
Their chief concern is that their own particular blessing might increase, namely , that truth that is in Christ, for which they live and hope. But besides this blessing they have the two greatest blessings in their death.
The first is that through death the whole tragedy of this world’s ills is ended. For the believer death is thus already dead, and behind its cloak and mask it holds no terrors. Like a slain serpent, death still has its former terrifying appearance, but now this is only a mask, for it is now a dead and harmless evil.
The other blessing of death is that death not only puts an end to the evils of this life’s punishments, but that death also-which is even more excellent-puts an end to all sins and vices.
Therefore, if we meditate on these joys of the power of Christ and on the gifts of his grace, how can any small evil distress us when in the great evil that is to come we see such a great blessing?” Martin Luther Fourteen Consolation
I came across this great passage yesterday:
A Kingdom That Cannot Be Shaken
For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.” Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
(Hebrews 12:18-24 ESV)
Yay Lily! Great reading and a good verse to know! 🙂
Thanks for the shout out!
I love the quote and am adding it to mine too!