Pie and Pancakes

If you've known me (Spencer) for over a year, you probably know that I enjoy celebrating Pi Day. It's not because I enjoy math so much; it's because I was raised in America and have learned to make even the flimsiest of excuses to eat large amounts of food. So each year, I like to buy a pie or two and share them with friends. This year, Cary Anne and I had our artists community group on Pi Day, so I shared it with them. As you can see, everyone seemed to enjoy it.

After Pi Day, our church started to get prepped for Easter. The central location of Community Christian wanted to use our campus to film the video that would show at all of the campuses on Easter Sunday, so two weeks prior to Easter many of us volunteered to take part in the filming. The rough part was that even in the middle of March, Chicago was still firmly within winter's grasp (as you can tell from the ice on the lake that was thick enough for people to stand on). The freezing temperatures and frigid wind made filming on the lake shore quite unpleasant, but the video itself (a modern retelling of the story of Thomas) turned out quite well. You can watch it here.

For our Good Friday service, we met at a local house that can be rented out for meetings and art showings. The theme of the night was, "Everything is different, but nothing's really changed," which was apparently inspired by the William Fitzsimmons song since we played part of the song during the service. At Community Edgewater, we tend to embrace the somber tone of Good Friday, setting the evening aside to think about what it would have been like for the disciples on the night Jesus died considering everything they had just invested the past 3 years of their life in was suddenly (seemingly) nothing. Inside the rented building, the whole first floor was gutted, with only the skeletal structure beams holding up the place. There were several tables set up with half-eaten food to show what it would have been like for the disciples to have returned to the uncleaned upper room after Jesus was betrayed. Everything is different, but nothing's really changed. For a while, we wandered around the wood beams and tables while our friend Patrick played the chello. After that, we moved up to the third floor of the building, which looked like a finished attic from the '70s, completely with orange shag carpet and wood paneling. During the service, members of our community shared stories of deep loss from their own lives.

Last Easter, our church had a small service on the shore of Lake Michigan. But this year, with our rising attendance and Chicago's dipping temperatures, we decided to just meet at our normal location, Swift Elementary. However, we did want to do something a little special, so we got back in touch with our Southern roots and had a pancake breakfast. Craig and Abby manned the griddles set up in front of the school. With the free breakfast in plain sight, we were even able to offer pancakes to random passer-bys. During the Easter service, the same people who shared stories of loss at our Good Friday Service talked about the hope that emerged from the darkness. Overall, it was a great Sunday, and we all kept hoping that, with Easter over and April beginning, Spring would show up sometime soon.