Flowers cover cross to add color for Easter
JOEL MARTIN | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 6 years, 6 months AGO
The finished flower cross stands outside Immanuel Lutheran Church on Easter Sunday.
Carolann Swartz, left, and Shawlene Martin cover the flower cross with greenery on Saturday.
Joel Martin/Columbia Basin Herald
Flowers wait inside the door of Immmanuel Lutheran Church on Saturday, ready to adorn the cross on Easter.
Joel Martin/Columbia Basin Herald
Carolann Swartz, front, Shawlene Martin, middle, and Mel Martin affix greenery to the flower cross on Saturday.
Joel Martin/Columbia Basin Herald
The finished flower cross stands outside Immanuel Lutheran Church on Easter Sunday.
Joel Martin/Columbia Basin Herald
A daffodil splashes color at the heart of Immanuel Lutheran Church’s flower cross on Easter Sunday.
Joel Martin/Columbia Basin Herald
Roses, daffodils and other blossoms adorn the flower cross at Immanuel Lutheran Church on Easter Sunday.
Joel Martin/Columbia Basin Herald
Joel Martin has been with the Columbia Basin Herald for more than 25 years in a variety of roles and is the most-tenured employee in the building. Martin is a married father of eight and enjoys spending time with his children and his wife, Christina. He is passionate about the paper’s mission of informing the people of the Columbia Basin because he knows it is important to record the history of the communities the publication serves. | April 13, 2020 11:24 PM
MOSES LAKE — It was eerily quiet in Moses Lake on Sunday morning. On the most important festival day of the western Christian calendar, churches across the Basin were closed, following Gov. Jay Inslee’s order to avoid gatherings because of the COVID-19 outbreak. But at Immanuel Lutheran Church, a few souls gathered to bring a little brightness to the day after all.
Parishioners Mel and Shawlene Martin, along with Carolann Swartz, revived the tradition of building a cross of flowers on the church lawn.
“Probably 20 years ago we used to do it and then we kind of stopped making the cross,” Shawlene Martin said. “We used to have the Sunday School kids bring the flowers, and of course, this year none of that will work, since we’re not having any services.”
The cross itself is just a couple of rough pieces of wood. The church has used it in Good Friday services in the past, with nails hammered in to illustrate the death of Christ. This year they covered it with chicken wire to hold the foliage and flowers in place. It stood on the church lawn this Good Friday as a stark reminder of the solemnity of the day.
Saturday afternoon, the Martins and Swartz came out and covered the wood with greenery, mostly clippings from shrubs.
“It serves kind of a dual purpose,” Swartz said. “It gets us out in the yard.”
“I cut up half my yard this morning,” said Mel Martin, grinning behind his mask.
Early Sunday morning, the three returned to the church again for the final flowering. Roses, daffodils, forsythias, anything with bright colors was trimmed and woven into the leaf-covered chicken wire. At the foot of the cross were Easter lilies in pots. You could hardly tell that there was wood behind the coat of yellow, red, green and a little pink.
Immanuel Lutheran is located next to the McCosh Park tennis courts, so plenty of people will get a chance to see it.
“We’re in a great location for people who drive by,” Shawlene Martin said. “It seemed to me that we needed something to spark people.”
“It’s something that we wanted to do to kind of show the community that we were here and that we cared about them and celebrate,” she said.
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