Easter Blessings

One of the highlights of the year around our studio is the celebration of Easter.  It's much more than bunnies, chocolate and Easter egg hunts for us. Although we do joyfully participate in all these fun traditions, Easter is really a time when we pause, with honor and respect, to remember the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made on our behalf, and on Sunday we celebrate the glorious resurrection of Jesus from the dead. We hope you'll pause to read the full historical account of the first Easter as recorded in the Bible. You'll find it over in chapters 18, 19 & 20 of the book of John. Today we're sending out a lighthearted Easter blessing to you and we hope you'll feel free to pass it along to others. It's a vibrant little graphic to share as we remember the greatest blessing ever given to all of us at Easter.

The Velvet Lime Girls 

Forgiveness

Forgiveness.  It's a word that goes right to the heart of Easter.

When Katie Wydock, Marybeth's youngest daughter, created this artwork for a school assignment, we immediately knew we would share it on Easter morning. We love her simple graphic style that portrayed forgiveness as a beautiful flower, filled with petal descriptions of the benefits to the body, mind and spirit.

It's a lovely reminder of the beautiful forgiveness purchased for us when Jesus Christ died and then rose from the dead on Easter morning.

Katie's artwork displays some of the benefits of forgiveness such as joy and happiness, but the forgiveness God has extended to us is far beyond these benefits.  God enabled us to have a real relationship with Him again.  All the things that separated us from Him, all the mistakes, wrong- doing, rebellion, bad decisions, attitudes and anger were wiped away through the death of Jesus and His resurrection.  God forgave us.  For everything.  And then paid the penalty due for all this with his only Son.  It's an amazing story of love and great forgiveness.

We're reminded of just how far God removed all the wrong things in our life in this passage:
" As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us."  
                                                             Psalms 103:12

God gave us the gift of a clean slate, a fresh start and a new beginning with life connected to Him.
And forgiveness paved the way.

Celebrating Easter,
The Velvet Lime Girls
Marybeth, Laura and Rebecca

His Only Son

It’s Easter Sunday today. A highlight in our year. We’ve been busy meeting our design submission deadlines for Easter themed products with images of bunnies, eggs, and flowers dressed in pastel colors. We love these light-hearted themes with their fun traditions and memories of childhood, but we hold in our hearts the real message of Easter.

It’s not a pastel colored message … it’s a vivid, piercing, bold color of love message that wraps itself around anyone who will receive it. A love that is so giving and far-reaching that it cannot be expressed from a color wheel or even from the entire light spectrum in our universe.

It’s a celebration message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. A new life has been made available to us, a way to an eternal relationship with God, because the shed blood of Jesus paid the penalty for sin that separated us from God. The full story can be found in the Bible.

What must it have been like when God chose to give his son … his only son, to a world He loved? This watercolor that hangs in our studio is our constant reminder of God’s great love.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16

Celebrating Easter and reminding you that you are so loved by God,

The Velvet Lime Girls

P.S. “His Only Son” – a watercolor study by a young student, James Rhodes, in 1974. When photographed for this blog, the flash accidently reflected off of the “heart.”