Coffee Break Group Celebrates Passover With Tea

On Tuesday, March 27, 2018, Coffee Break Women’s Bible Study at Yosemite Church, Merced, hosted its fifteenth annual Spring Tea — with a twist. Following on the heels of a study of Exodus, the tea celebrated the Passover, which fell on Saturday, March 31 of this year. Rabbi Amnon Shor and his wife Lynette of Bet Shalom Messianic Congregation in Fresno came up to perform the Passover Seder ceremony. Traditional tea scones and sandwich bread were replaced with leaven-free matzo and sesame crackers for the morning’s fare.  About three hundred women attended. The forty tables were individually decorated, with no two alike, each having a Seder plate with symbolic foods used in the retelling of the Passover story. The ceremony opened and closed with the blowing of the shofar, or ram’s horn.

I think the entire study of Exodus and then culminating with the Seder, showed women the richness of God’s Word. There were so many “ahas” for our ladies. For many women it was the first time they were able to connect the dots of the Old Testament to the New Testament. It was the first time they saw God’s perfect plan of redemption beginning in the Old Testament and pointing to Jesus in the New Testament. Lots of eyes opened when learning about how the blood of the sacrificed lamb painted on the doorposts caused the angel of death to pass over and how the blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God, sacrificed for us, causes us to have the hope of eternal life. Studying all of this and then having the Rabbi at the Seder explain it all really was powerful. It showed how perfect His plans are and how perfect His Word is! I received several texts from women sharing how meaningful Easter was for them after experiencing the Exodus study and ending with the Seder, just a few days before Good Friday.

On a personal note, as a Coffee Break Leader, I (and my team) were humbled to see how God brought it all together for us. It was clear it was His design to study Exodus and do the Seder at this particular time. (there were so many “coincidences” as we planned ... His fingerprints were all over every part of it ... even in ending up with 41 lamb shanks when we needed 40!) It was a privilege to serve Him through this event. It brought us closer together as a team. We truly felt amazed that He has called us to serve Him through Coffee Break. Our prayer is always that He is glorified through this ministry and that women are pointed to Him through Coffee Break. We saw that through the study of Exodus and through the Seder.