The dolls were SO excited! They were getting to go on a real true Easter egg hunt! They had had egg hunts before but never outside like this one. This one was even more fun because they were in Virginia and it was already spring! The flowers and trees were budding and blooming all over the place! Madeline and Camille couldn’t wait to pile candy in their bags. Camille hoped one of the eggs she found would contain a chocolate egg.
Hannah and Keisha ran across the lot to the first patch of flowers where the eggs were supposed to be hidden.
“I found one!” Hannah cried, “I hope it’s jelly beans! I’ll eat the green ones and give you the grape ones!”
Hannah put her fingers along the crack and tried to open it. “Gosh, it’s hard to open, I’m scared all the jelly beans will pop spilling out!”
Keisha took it and successfully pried it open. They were quite surprised to only find one item in the egg and it wasn’t a jelly bean. It wasn’t even any candy at all.
“It’s a donkey!?!” Hannah asked, “What’s a donkey doing in an egg? What’s a donkey have to do with Easter?”
“Ahahaha! I bet it’s a joke from Lindsey!” Keisha said, “I bet it’s Christmas in Easter! I bet we’ll find some more with camels and sheep and ox and shepherds and wise men!”
Keisha was almost right, but not quite….Annaleis and Heather were also on the hunt for eggs. Annaleis was the tallest doll and liked to look up because of that. She was the one who spotted the next egg.
“Look! Look! It’s up there!” Annaleis called out. They both ran to the cherry tree that was full of blossoms and began to climb. Heather got to the closest branch and began to reach —
“YEEK!!” Heather shrieked as she slipped and her shoe came off.
“I guess these aren’t very good shoes to climb trees in,” Annaleis shook her head.
“No, and it’s even worse in a dress! But I think I can still get it.”
“Don’t fall!” Heather got the egg this time. She handed it to Annaleis to open.
“Well, that’s funny! Look what’s inside! It’s a communion cup.”
Keisha and Hannah walked up to the tree with them and saw their egg was open. “Hey, what did you get in your egg? We got a really weird thing – we got a donkey! We think it might be Lindsey playing tricks on us and doing Easter Christmas with donkeys and camels and sheep!”
“A donkey!” Annaleis almost laughed but then she looked again in her own egg and the pieces were starting to come together in her head, “You might be on to something Keisha, but I”m not sure if it’s Christmas. We got a communion cup in ours. I think yours might be representing Palm Sunday. The day Jesus rode on a donkey into Jerusalem. Kings often rode on donkeys to signify peace and Jesus is the King of kings of peace.”
“So our communion cup must remind us of the Lord’s supper where He showed us how He is the perfect sacrifice. Before Jesus, people would have to bring animals to sacrifice for their sins, but Jesus gave His own perfect body and blood and that is why we eat bread and drink wine in communion at church,” Heather explained.
“Hey look! Here some giant communion cups!” Madeline smiled, “We can even fit inside them!”
“Hee!” Chloe giggled, “Those aren’t communion cups. They’re not even cups at all. They’re flower pots!”
“Oh, yay!” Camille squealed as she clambered into a flower pot, “I want to get planted! ‘I’m a little flower pink and white. I grow towards the sun with all my might. With a little rain and tender care, my leaves and petals grow tall and fair.”
Everyone climbed into a flower pot and pretended to grow while looking for eggs. It was Sophie who found one.
“Here’s a pink one!” She called out.
“Oo! I can hear it rattle,” Chloe said, “Open it and see what’s in it!”
“Money!” Sophie cried.”What would money have to do with Jesus?” Madeline asked.
“Maybe when Jesus overturned the money changer’s tables in the temple?” Sophie guessed.
“No, I would say it’s Judas who betrayed Jesus over to the Roman soldiers for 30 pieces of silver. Judas pretended to be Jesus’ friend and follow Him, but then he handed Him over to be killed.”
“Ooh! Look at these beautiful flowers!” Annaleis skipped down from the tree she and Heather had climbed and jumped among the orange tulips and geraniums. She suddenly stopped mid-skip and shouted, “I found another egg!”
Heather came running towards the orange egg. “Let’s see what’s inside this one.”
Annaleis opened it to reveal a set of praying hands. “Praying hands…Jesus prayed in the garden at Gethsemane,” Heather remembered, “Prayer is the greatest gift a person can give.”
“The greatest gift? What do you mean?” Annaleis asked.
“Who’s the greatest most amazing being you can think of?”
“Oh…God.”
“Exactly. And by praying, we’re giving Him what He wants most – for us to confide in Him. And He listens and answers and blesses. ‘He will call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him’ Psalm 91:15.”
Hannah and Madeline found another egg buried in the daffodils.
“Here it is! It’s popping out like it’s part of the flower!”
“I wonder what’s inside!”
“I bet it’s not candy!”
And indeed, it wasn’t. Inside the egg were two strips of leather.
“Are these shoelaces?” Hannah asked.
“No, I think it’s something much worse,” Madeline answered, “Jesus was whipped by the soldiers and beaten too. He suffered tremendously.”
“It is amazing to think the greatest, most almighty, most powerful, all seeing – omnipotent and omniscient and most holy God of gods brought Himself down so low to be whipped and beaten like a common criminal.”
Katelynne and Camille were walking in the yellow forsythia garden. “I feel like I”m walking under sunshine times two!” Camille said, “I’m walking under flower sunshine and real sunshine!”
“Good thing you’re wearing a hat!” Katelynne joked, “Or else you’d really get burned!”
The girls looked up at the golden flowers. “Look look! I think I see two eggs hiding in the flowers, do you?”
It was almost imperceptible to see, but sure enough there were two eggs hiding up in the bush. “I can’t believe we saw them! Let’s go climbing and get them!”The two dolls carefully made their way up the branches to the eggs.
“We get our own little sunshines to open!” Camille said. They both opened theirs at the same time.
Katelynne put her fingers in the egg to take her prize out.”Ouch!” She cried. Katelynne had pulled out a little crown of thorns and Camille held out a cross made of nails.
“Feel this….the soldiers made a crown of this and put it on Jesus head. Then they beat His head to make Him hurt and bleed.”
“That’s so awful….” Camille shook her head. She couldn’t quite imagine such pain, physical, emotional and mental all happening at the same time. And He was living what He knew was going to happen to Him before it had even happened.
“And He did it freely,” Katelynne seemed to read her thoughts, “He even said His kingdom isn’t of this world and if it was, none of this would’ve happened, and Pilate and King Herod wouldn’t have had any power over Him. But He was doing what we can never do; take on the punishment of our sins in eternal death.”
“Hey Katelynne!” a voice shouted, “Come here!”
Katelynne raced over to another patch of yellow flowers where Keisha was standing. “Did you find another egg?”
“Yes! Come open it with me.” Katelynne pulled one end and Keisha pulled the other until it popped open and two dice spilled out.
“Effectuate,” Keisha said. “Effectuate?”
“Yes, it means to put into force or operation and that’s what Jesus did: He put all the prophecies spoken about Him into action or operation. The soldiers cast lots for His tunic because it was seamless which was prophesied in the Psalms.”
Megan had been listening to Katelynne and Keisha’s conversation, “I wonder if this is another effectuated egg too!” She said, pointing at a purple egg camouflaged in a purple blossom tree.
“Let’s find out!”
Megan took the egg and opened it, “It’s a spear from the centurion who realized who Jesus was and what they’d done to Him.”
“Yes, he was a Roman soldier, an enemy soldier who truly believed Jesus was the Son of God. I think he was feeling the greatest tragedy of the whole world seeing Jesus hanging dead like that.”
“Yes. He was seeing death as the final finality, the conclusion and the end.”
“Like death had swallowed Him up.”
“Do you think this egg might give us any hope?” Madeline asked Megan, holding up a cream colored egg.
“It might….go and open it.”
“It’s cloth,” Madeline held it out.
“Yes, they wrapped Jesus body in linen and placed Him in a tomb.”
Roooom!! Rooom!!! The rumbling distant noise got louder and louder as a big red flower truck came rumbling up to them.
“Wow! I guess we get to ride in it to search for more eggs!” Sophie said as all the dolls piled in. “This is quite the extravagant Easter egg hunt!”
The flower truck drove them down a little lane through fields of brightly colored flowers until it stopped at a little church.
A bunch of church dolls greeted them.
“Good afternoon!” Willow greeted them, “We’re decorating the church with Easter flowers!”
“And I think you might have an Easter egg to find in them!”
All the dolls squealed and started searching in the flowers for the egg.
The dolls looked among the hydrangas in the narthex, but they didn’t find any egg.
They wandered into the sanctuary where there were flowers surrounding the altar and Easter lilies at the cross.
“Do you think it would be here?” Sarah asked Rose quietly.
“I think I see it!” Rose called out, pointing.
Sarah took the egg and sat down to open it. It was surprisingly heavy.
“It’s a stone!” she said, holding it up, “The stone that God Himself rolled away to reveal the empty tomb!”
“Wow! That means we have one more egg left! I wonder what will be inside it!”
The dolls ran back outside and started searching while guessing what they might find in the last egg.
“I bet we’ll find flowers! Easter lilies! Every time we’ve found an egg it’s always been around flowers,” Madeline said.
“I bet it will be a picture of Jesus risen from the dead!” Madeline said.
“But we haven’t had any candy in any eggs yet! Surely the last one will have some kind of candy or chocolate,” Sophie said.
“Hey look! I found it!” Madeline reached into a flower bed, picked up the egg and handed it to Sophie.
“Here, you take it so you can get first pickings on the candy if there is any.”
Sophie twisted the egg apart and looked inside.
“There’s nothing!”
“Nothing!”
“I knew there’d be nothing, cause when they looked in the tomb, what did the disciples see? Nothing! The tomb was empty!”
“Christ is risen!””He is risen indeed! Alleluia!”
The end
Behind the Scenes: Thank you all for waiting for this belated Easter post. I was most blessed to be able to spend the Easter week in VA with my family and boyfriend. My sweet aunt and I got to take the dolls on two outings! We went all over Yorktown and Newport News visiting our church, the hospital, and later we went on another outing with my grandma to a flower store to take all these Easter pictures with the dolls. It was so much fun!
-Heather
