Happy Easter! This year for Lent our family started a new tradition, the Lenten Cross. It was inspired by how much Elliot loved our Jesse Tree for Advent (below).

Jesse Tree

We are keen to build some of the rhythms of the church year into our family life in a sustainable way – that means the activity needs to be low prep (after the first year) and light and flat so it can be easily transported in suitcases between countries.

For the Lenten cross, you stick up one of 40 pictures each day to make the shape of a cross. Because the Jesse Tree does the big picture of the Bible including some of the prophecies about Jesus, I thought a good complement would be focusing on the gospels for Lent. The pictures start with Jesus’ ministry, and the second half zooms in on the final week of Jesus’ life.

It took me a morning to draw the pictures (I’m no artist!) and then I had them laminated for durability and re-usability.

Here’s a pdf of the passages and a description of the accompanying picture. With Elliot’s 2 year old attention span, at the moment we just tell a 1 sentence story for each picture instead of reading the Bible passage. That’s included too.

Here’s how our Lenten Cross looked finished today on Easter Sunday:

Categories: Written by Tamie

Tagged as: Bible Easter Easter story in pictures images Lent Lenten cross parenting pictures

Tamie Davis

Tamie Davis is an Aussie living in Tanzania, writing at meetjesusatuni.com.