Holy Week Walk

 One day in Feburary I texted my friend from the ward Leslie a video I had seen on instagram about an Easter walk through a church building. I sent her the link and said, "How ambitious do you want to be for Easter? I'll help!" And she replied with "VERY ambitions". And "A Walk with Jesus" From that moment on we were texting regularly ideas and trying to decide how to pull this off in our building. We ordered almost 50 photo backdrops on Temu to cover as much as the building as we could so you didn't feel like you were in a standard church meetinghouse.

Our stake presidency was a hundred percent behind us and a wonderful guy in our ward runs the Goshen set for the church and said we could borrow props. So we took trucks and trailers down and borrowed to many beautiful trees, pots and tapestries to make our walk what it was.

This documents the wall I made that fell down and the banner I made with Leslie's fabric that were going to be curtains. Next year I'll make the lettering WAY bigger. Originally that was going to hang inside the arch. When we couldn't do that Dawnya's husband had the idea to hang it on the outside of the building and it made a great impact.

This picture will always remind me of the best most stressful story ever that I'll always remember. That's all I'll say about that.

This is just a glipmse of the front foyers.

Leslie and Dawnya and I lived at the church that week. We bonded so much and stayed up so late. By the end of it we coudn't believe it but we estimate that 5000 people walked through our Holy Week walk. We were in tears. So happy to work with visionary people!

And then there were seven...

 The line "Here's my heart Lord take and seal it" from Come Thou Font of Every Blessing has been playing in my mind over and over again for the past couple of weeks. Sending a child on a mission is a whole new level of consecration I have never understood until I have been on the parental side.

Turns out being a return missionary myself doesn't make it any easier when it's time to say goodbye. Sending your own child off feels so unique and individual that you forget thousands of parents have done this before you and thousands will do it after me. When it's your own child it feels so sacred, so personal and so hard. We are so happy and excited for him but today was REALLY hard!

He's been using my old mission scriptures for home MTC. This morning he came upstairs and asked if he could take them with him. When you save stuff you always hope that somehow they'll be used to help your posterity. I loved those scriptures. Though I had no idea just 21 years later these scriptures would go right back to Buenos Aires.

All the kids before we headed out.

Everyone was pretty emotional the whole way to Provo. We went to chickfila for his last meal and saw several other missionaries getting ready to head into the MTC.

This will about rip your heart out. Seeing him teary and sad was the hardest part!

We knew he was going to be fine in just a matter of days but man saying goodbye was pretty rough.

This was it - we're so dang proud of that kid!

We all cried most of the way home from the MTC. I took this photo as proof that Mallie and Lucy did indeed cry even though they told Bug they probably wouldn't and that he shouldn't be offended about it.