Happy Easter / New Year

I love springtime and prefer to view it as the beginning of a new year. I never felt dark, cold January was the time of new beginnings. And neither does the Bible (Exodus 12:1). For the Children of Israel the Passover marked the beginning of months, the first month of the year since it commemorated God delivering them from their bondage in Egypt.

We Christians are intimately linked to the annual Passover celebration. That's why the date our Easter celebration keeps moving. We are tied into the marking of the new year based upon the lunar months. Note, for instance, the peculiar KJV translation of Acts 12:4—". . .intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people." Every other English version has Passover. The point: Jesus was crucified during the Passover celebration and rose from the dead on the first day after that week's Sabbath.  For reasons unknown to me the King James translators used Easter at that point to translate the Greek Pascha or Passover. 

In any event, it is Eastertide and I invite you to join me in this new year with a new heart of hope. To mark that new beginning I am shifting the focus of this Blog and of the Reclaiming Our Heritage website linked to it. During this new year two things will now change:

1. The monthly newsletter or ezine with the various articles connected to it will now cease. We will retain earlier articles in the Reclaiming Our Heritage archives and you will still be able to search for them. However, starting with this new month, the month of the Passover and Easter, we will no longer publish monthly ezines. 
2. Instead of the ezines I will post several new blogs each week. These blogs will appear on the front page of the website, will be archived there and will be discoverable through a search.

If you wish to contribute to the ROH Blog send me an email with your copy attached. I will continue to serve as the editor and will post it as a Blog after we have discussed the content. In some cases longer articles will be posted in serial form over a number of days.

One more thing. If you would like to receive the Blog postings, use the RSS feed either on the Blog page or on the front of the ROH website.

As always, dear friends, the contributors to ROH and I thank you for your continued support and prayer.

—Al Franzmeier, editor and Blogger