Yesterday, I was thinking about children's ministry and all the things it entails. I'm a teacher, friend, organizer, planner, cleaner, etc. The one thing that I don't think is in my job description is cleaning out melted chocolate from plastic Easter eggs. Picture this: We have a MASSIVE Easter egg hunt on Easter Sunday and it was close to 90 degrees outside!! Is there anywhere that you can hide an Easter egg in 90 degree weather that the chocolate inside won't melt? I think those eggs were doomed before they ever left the church!! =)

So, after the egg hunt, we asked parents to return the eggs if they weren't going to use them again so that we could recycle them for next year. I got back 2 clothes hampers FULL of eggs. The only thing is that most of them had melted chocolate somewhere on them.

So, I came home and just put the hamper behind my office door. I guess I hoped at some point they would just clean themselves or something. But, my husband was out of town one night this week and I decided to get a little organized in my office. I moved some stuff around and looked behind my door and there was that hamper full of chocolate covered plastic Easter eggs!! So, the boys and I decided that we were going to clean them. I didn't think it would take more than 30 minutes to clean the whole hamper full.

4 hours later, I was reaching the bottom of the hamper. We sorted all of the eggs from the original hamper into two groups: Dirty & Clean. Our dirty pile was about 1/2 of a hamper full. I sure didn't think it would take that long to clean 1/2 of a hamper full, but boy was I wrong!!

As I'm wiping off melted M&Ms from this one egg, I looked at the hamper and wondered: Is this really in my job description?!? Does it say somewhere that the children's pastor has to clean melted chocolate from the Easter eggs?

Then, I had a funny picture in my head: The Bible says to store up your treasures in Heaven and when we get to Heaven, that's where the real reward is. I wonder how God is going to reward me for cleaning Easter eggs? I pictured my first day in Heaven just looking around and someone takes me to my mansion and says, "Welcome Home". I open the door and there is a hamper of SPOTLESS, SPARKLING Easter eggs. Whoever led me to my mansion said, "Chocolate doesn't melt in heaven."

Wouldn't that be just like God? His sense of humor? There was also a golden bottle of ketchup on the mantle above the fireplace!!