Easter Monday, April 6, 2026
This is the Octave of Easter
This is also Andi’s birthday …
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Artist in a mama’s smock
A few words from the past … on Andi’s birthday …
2007
Andi graduated from high school last year, member of the National Honor Society. This year she’s a University of Illinois freshman living in a Christian community called Stratford House, taking art classes, becoming more of the woman God made her to be. During spring break she joined a group of guys and girls (well, one other girl) to help put a roof on a new Habitat home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. She didn’t get much homework done.
Or did she?
Don’t tell the people soon to move into their new home that she wasn’t about her Father’s business. Like the rest of us, Andi has 168 hours in her week, and she alone makes decisions about how to use those hours. How well does she listen to her Father?
I was a little boy. I loved my grandpa. We played in the sand together. He let me help him wash his car. Sometimes I spent the night with him in his big bed upstairs, kept company in the dark by the two black-dressed aunts frowning from oval frames above our heads.
I was overjoyed in my Christmas pajamas when Mom and Dad bought me a rocking horse for Christmas. My parents beamed. They didn’t beam at everything I did, that’s for sure. Then a few years later God made Margaret and I parents. So now we watch our children grow.
But I do want her to know how God loves her. How much she means to him. How every step of her path through 20 years of life is directed by him. She means everything to her Father. And that’s not just me. Not even mostly me. She means everything to God, her Father forever.
Just these few generations – maybe four, or finally five – that I will know. I kneel in awe and wonder before God, who “remembers his covenant forever, the word he commanded for a thousand generations.” It is not just us, but her Father in heaven, who pours out on Andi today birthday blessings. Happy birthday, Andi.
2009
This is a special year for our daughter Andi. She’ll graduate from the University of Illinois a week after Mother’s Day, and then she and Aki Tomita will be married a month later. And today is her birthday.
When she was two years old we went to the St. Louis Art Museum. She was dressed in a velvety black winter coat and a red hat. We wandered among the galleries:
One of the best parts of graduation day will be to visit the Krannert Art Museum at the U of I to see her work. Paintings and sculpture and drawings …
How grateful are we to have lived with Andi (and cried with her and laughed with her …) for 23 years? How much do we love life? We love Andi like that. She has found many ways to share herself with others. Her eyes and heart seem to seek people who are too alone, and she walks beside them. She is drawn to brokenness in people and things; she spent hundreds of hours last semester finding broken objects and transforming them into something new.
We have watched Andi come to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. She has plenty of living yet to do. Wife, artist, art teacher, mom all lie ahead of her. Today she’s helping with art classes at Arthur Jr/Sr High School, and later this week she’ll attend a teacher’s job fair in Austin, Texas.
What does God look like to Andi? She has her own ways and means to seek his face. He is the one who knows her best. He has the most investment in his birthday girl. He shows Himself to her just the way she needs to see Him. And I know he will do that again and again, all the days of her life.
2017
This is Andi’s 31st birthday. I think of her as one of the best promise-keepers I know. She not only remembers what she’s committed to, but she does her part early. I’ll bet her U of I student project teams loved her. She studied art, art education, and industrial design. She lived in a community of Christian women (Stratford House) and later with a roommate (her cousin). She kept her promises.
Now she’s Aki’s wife and Miles’ mom. She teaches art at a Christian co-op school in Austin. She loves to spend time with her brothers and her friends. Her life can get complicated. But it is so much less so than it might be, because she keeps her promises.
2019
Our daughter will have another baby soon. She herself was born today, in 1986.
Margaret wasn’t sure about this birth, after 54 hours of protracted labor and then a prolapsed cord and Caesarean section with the last two. Boys, those were. This was Andrea, a girl. She was far more gentle on her mom. Still, at every appointment Margaret asked again, “Does it look like we can finally use the birthing room?”
On that fine spring day we drove by our church in Lincoln, Illinois, and watched our friends go in. We prayed for them to pray for us. Margaret’s labor pains were getting stronger. In Springfield, after directing her church’s children’s choir, Dr. Nichols met us in the birthing room. Yes, this time we would stay there. Dr. Nichols put Margaret before whatever malpractice thoughts she might have had.
The sun shone bright and beautiful. After just the right moves, the baby turned around. With quick and sweet efficiency, “slick as a whistle” in her mother’s words, Andi was born on Sunday afternoon.
Pictures of her all grown up at two years old, wearing a thick and lovely winter coat, show her innocence in bloom. With her smiles and her joy, this spring baby has inspired us for all her life. She sparkles at a party. She loves her friends, remembers them. For those seemingly less blessed than her, she always feels compassion, and often acts on it. She’s an artist.
Oh, the stories we can tell. At three, she slipped into the drivers seat and put the car in gear. How could she? She was unharmed. Later with her new permit, we rode with her while she drove in fear down Grand Avenue from the suburbs to downtown Chicago. How could I? But again, she was unharmed. Sixteen, she backed the car into our super-busy, four-lane street for the first time, alone. My heart was in my mouth. She waved, and drove away. Safe, she was, again.
My friend gave us a kitten which was born without a tail. Andi named her Precious, and Precious soon had kittens of her own. Andi loved them all. Our black dog Bear went along with her when she delivered papers. Bear was her confidant, and I think she was his.
Her Austin classroom fills up every year with kids’ creations. She gives them her love of art and music, and they explore the world together – the world as it is, not as she would have it. Like us all, like Jeremiah, like the psalmist, and like Jesus, Andi sees the world’s collapses into ugliness and sin. Sometimes I can feel her shiver in her innocence, in her acceptance of God’s love. Without a doubt, her shield is God most high.
Not to say she doesn’t fall herself. But saint and sinner always reside in the same soul, at the same address. I have no doubt that one day, some day, as it says in Proverbs, her children will arise and call her blessed.
Lord, this girl, this baby girl, has been such a gift to us, we thank you. Dry any tears she has and ease her pains, hold her closer when she laughs, and bring her every day into your eternal moment. Surround her with your angels and give her good dreams. You have made so many of her dreams come true.
2020
Andi and Aki and Miles and Jasper spent a little time outdoors today, waving their own homemade palm branches. They traced their hands onto green construction paper, attached the new green palm-like hands to watercolor paint brushes, (you could also use fan handles), and took their party to the streets. Miles shouted his hosannas, and led the parade through the spring-blooming state flowers, Texas blue bonnets. The crowds cried themselves hoarse. Jesus is alive!
2021
The promise is made to you and to your children and to all those far off, whomever the Lord our God will call.
Margaret and I loved picking up Andi from church camp at Little Galilee because she told us everything, detail by detail, blow by blow, about her life at camp for a week. Stories about the events, the people, the bugs, the food and the insights all flowed out on our hour-long ride home from Clinton to Urbana, Illinois.
See, the eyes of the Lord are upon those who fear him, upon those who hope for his kindness, to deliver them from death and to preserve them.
There came a time when she made up her mind to be baptized at Little Galilee. We got a little advance notice, so her grandparents from Lincoln and her brothers in their own car and her parents all made it to poolside in time to see her baptism. She didn’t smile, and she didn’t much look at us. Andi was shy that day, and thoughtful. This baptism thing was a big deal. Her camp counselor spoke quietly to her, Andi nodded her head and held her nose, and down in the water she went.
As I went down in the river to pray
Studyin’ about that good ol’ way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way …
O sisters, let’s go down
Let’s go down, come on down
On Easter Sunday this year we watched baptisms for half an hour, zoomed in to Austin from West Side in Springfield, where Andi’s brother and sister-in-law are pastors. Each baptism was precious. Two ladies over 75 years old giggled at this unexpected moment of joy as they got baptized at last.
Today is Andi’s birthday. Margaret is reluctant to acknowledge thirty-five-year-old kids, because of course that makes her … what? We are born, we grow, we get older, we get old. Time flies, and this aging thing is better by far than the alternative. So we’ll celebrate her thirty-fifth with all our might.
Yesterday Margaret helped Miles and Jasper make gifts for their mom, personalized bags and beautiful collages from magazine pictures, and even some deviled eggs from the colored Easter eggs we made last week. Today we’ll spend part of our day remembering … the Life of Andrea Lee Sandel Tomita: Her cat Precious, her dog Bear, her friend Toni, her golf teacher, who was inspirational. “As long as the ball goes forward, we’re making progress,” he said. As we do often, we’ll recall her favorite teacher Mrs. Rainer. We’ll listen in our minds to her confident claim to the loyalty of her brothers. “Those are MY boys!” she said. And we’ll remember the busy joy of her wedding with Aki in 2009 at Lake of the Woods, watching her walk across a red Japanese bridge into the next day of the rest of her life.
Jesus said to Mary, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and tell my brothers, “I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God!”
These days she teaches art at a Christian school and facilitates a young married class at Grace Covenant Church with Aki. She writes a blog designed for parents with young kids who want to bring up their children in the way of Jesus. In the blog she often quotes her four year old son Miles, whether or not he is saying what she hopes he’ll say.
At the playground with us last week she climbed to the top of the highest spiral slide and flew down with Jasper, who is 19 months old. Their hair blew in the wind. On Easter we found a bluebonnet field and she pulled together her family for some pictures. Today, whether it’s her birthday or not, she’ll be doing cool stuff with her kids.
A wife of noble character, who can find? She is worth far more than rubies … she opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy. Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her.
Years ago, on their home’s guest bathroom mirror, Andi wrote Philippians 4:8. It’s still there:
Whatever is true, whatever is noble, what is right, whatever is pure, lovely, and admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, THINK ON THESE THINGS.
It is hard work being a wife and mom and teacher and daughter. In the hallway near the front door, where she can’t miss it, she created a beautiful sign, for herself and for all of us.
I don’t want to treat my blessings as burdens.
Great job, Andi. God is good. We’re so glad to be your mom and dad.
2021
We made cookies with Jasper for Andi’s birthday yesterday. She came after school with Miles, and everybody had gifts for her. Miles gave her a snow globe filled with colored paper he cut into tiny pieces. Jasper gave her a beautiful red necklace. I gave her a huge photo of a wagon wheel, taller than Jasper, big enough to decorate the largest wall.
But mostly, it was the cookies. We sang Happy Birthday, led by Miles, who had by far the strongest voice, even if it’s only five years old. We poured whole milk into small glasses and served the biggest chocolate chunk almond gluten free cookies I’ve ever seen. Jasper was jumping up and down.
He helped measure and pour the sugar and the flour, the vanilla and the eggs, and then he stirred and stirred. We threw in chocolate chunks and slivered almonds and stirred some more. A few times he was unsure about whether to stir and stir, or lick the spoon. Finally we were finished and he sat on the floor and licked the bowl. That took awhile. Not long after that we had mussels for lunch. He drank the mussel juice and flexed his arms. Before lunch Jasper took a break, sat in the sun looking out the window, and read his book.
I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.
Naps. Deep sleep for Jasper. He awoke after two hours or so, but only slowly, with gentle encouragement. I plopped him beside the cookie-making table. We used our big disher to make our huge cookies. The disher was too much for his little hands and wrists, but he pushed each pile of dough down with his palm. The cookies were done just about the same time his brother and mommy came in the door. And like I said, he was jumping up and down, running back and forth, shouting. So proud. And the whole apartment smelled so good.
Jesus said, “If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing. But it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’”
At school Andi got to celebrate her birth moment today, she said. 1:10 pm, born on a Sunday afternoon. And someone saved a copy of the Austin Statesmen for her, to add to the pile of April 6 papers she has collected over the years. Andi was a papergirl in our Urbana neighborhood in the 1990’s. She sat on the floor, rolled up the papers and rode her bike around the block, day after day after day. Our black lab Bear went with her. She started saving birthday papers then.
Miles discovered voice recording with the phone he gets to use, and so we have a record of that birthday song. The best part about birthdays in our family is that it’s the beginning of Birthday Week, so … who knows what joys and beauties we have yet to behold?
Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.”
2022
We made cookies with Jasper for Andi’s birthday yesterday. She came after school with Miles, and everybody had gifts for her. Miles gave her a snow globe filled with colored paper he cut into tiny pieces. Jasper gave her a beautiful red necklace. I gave her a huge photo of a wagon wheel, taller than Jasper, big enough to decorate the largest wall.
But mostly, it was the cookies. We sang Happy Birthday, led by Miles, who had by far the strongest voice, even if it’s only five years old. We poured whole milk into small glasses and served the biggest chocolate chunk almond gluten free cookies I’ve ever seen. Jasper was jumping up and down.
He helped measure and pour the sugar and the flour, the vanilla and the eggs, and then he stirred and stirred. We threw in chocolate chunks and slivered almonds and stirred some more. A few times he was unsure about whether to stir and stir, or lick the spoon. Finally we were finished and he sat on the floor and licked the bowl. That took awhile. Not long after that we had mussels for lunch. He drank the mussel juice and flexed his arms. Before lunch Jasper took a break, sat in the sun looking out the window, and read his book.
I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.
Naps. Deep sleep for Jasper. He awoke after two hours or so, but only slowly, with gentle encouragement. I plopped him beside the cookie-making table. We used our big disher to make our huge cookies. The disher was too much for his little hands and wrists, but he pushed each pile of dough down with his palm. The cookies were done just about the same time his brother and mommy came in the door. And like I said, he was jumping up and down, running back and forth, shouting. So proud. And the whole apartment smelled so good.
Jesus said, “If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing. But it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’”
At school Andi got to celebrate her birth moment today, she said. 1:10 pm, born on a Sunday afternoon. And someone saved a copy of the Austin Statesmen for her, to add to the pile of April 6 papers she has collected over the years. Andi was a papergirl in our Urbana neighborhood in the 1990’s. She sat on the floor, rolled up the papers and rode her bike around the block, day after day after day. Our black lab Bear went with her. She started saving birthday papers then.
Miles discovered voice recording with the phone he gets to use, and so we have a record of that birthday song. The best part about birthdays in our family is that it’s the beginning of Birthday Week, so … who knows what joys and beauties we have yet to behold?
…. We had dinner with Jasper and Miles while Andi and Aki went to a drive-in movie, celebrating Andi’s birthday. Bits of chopped antipasto and linguine, salmon cakes, chocolate from the treat bags (Halloween lasts all year at their house) and even a few bites of bread and bagel, then they brushed their teeth, they jumped all over the room and screamed, they slowly settled down into stories.
This story started with a renegade orange eating in the space station, having trouble with gravity at first. The orange began frying flying pancakes, who protested loudly about how hot the pan was, and slowly we realized their names were Andi, and Miles, and Jasper and Aki. The orange had to keep them under control, and they kept asking the orange for mercy, but the orange just fried them on one side and then the other and watched their bubbles slow, and fade, and popped them into a warming pan, one by one, and slammed the lid down on them, and refused to hear their pleas for mercy.
“Hush!” The orange glowered, and frowned, and shouted, and warned them. “What’s wrong with you? You were made for me to eat!” But the tables turned at last, when the orange began scratching his navel, and Mommy, the Queen of All Pancakes, got up her gumption and threw her gravity-less self over the orange and held him down, while the other three made short work of him, peeling him, quartering him, squeezing him and drinking down his juice. He whimpered and pleaded, but to no avail.
“Ah!” Miles smiled at Jasper, and Jasper smiled at Daddy, and Daddy smiled at Mommy. “We got our vitamin C today.”
It was a little awkward for me, falling asleep after a story like that and then waking again on the floor beside Miles’ bed, stretching and reclaiming the ligaments in my back and heading downstairs to wait for our kiddos to get home. Downstairs we had a few bites of pineapple sherbet, because the orange had disappeared somewhere. And we settled into the early hours of Saturday, knowing how close Holy Week is at last, how the crowds will shout hosannas on Sunday and we will join them in spirit, unless this year is different from all the rest.
2025
See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
We have been watching video from 37 years ago, watching Andi in play therapy with her teacher from Illinois State University, learning to trust her body and trust her mind. Later we’ll watch video from 30 years ago, when Andi spent part of her grade school years with her favorite teacher, Mrs. Rainer. After school we often brought our black dog Bear to school so the kids could pet him and play with him. Andi was so proud.
It’s so good to look back on those days and appreciate how much has happened since. Isn’t that what family movies are for?
Andi became a superb student and then an even more excellent teacher. Reading Jacques Maritain’s thoughts about the stages of education, I think of Andi and how so much of what he says sounds just right:
The child’s mentality tends by itself toward magic, and whatever effort the teacher may make, his teaching always runs the risk of being caught and engulfed in a magic ocean.
It is by virtue of the allure of beautiful things and deeds and ideas that the child is to be led and awakened to intellectual and moral life.
The vitality and intuitiveness of the spirit are quick in the young child and sometimes pierce the world of her imaginative thought with the purest and most surprising flashes, as if her spirit, being not yet both strengthened and organized by the exercise of reason, enjoyed a kind of bounding, temperamental, and lucid freedom.
The quality of the mode or style is of much greater moment than the quantity of things taught, it constitutes the very soul of teaching, preserves its unity and makes it alive and buoyant.
Our favorite teachers, led by Mrs. Rainier at Martin Luther King Elementary in Urbana, bring these thoughts to life. When the “magic ocean” engulfs a child, the teacher jumps into the waves as well. Noticing beauty and calling it out, whether in the nature of trees and flowers or the human nature of one child with another, a teacher turns the face of a bored child up to see the sky. And can you imagine, or remember, how great it feels when in your own “bounding freedom” you are joined by an adult companion, who encourages your spirit to ever greater heights?
Reading, writing and arithmetic, together with competence at playing her flute, together with more and more creative and beautiful art, allows Andi to teach the children in her art classes something of what she knows about making things, noticing and naming their beauty, and feeling the pride of a creative spirit.
And of course there have been babies in Andi and Aki’s life. A new baby, Finn, passed his one month birthday on Monday last week. Andi has been showering her Tinybeans account with pictures of two boys loving on the third. Coochie, coochie coo! It won’t be long before Finn is laughing along with Miles and Jasper, and then they will tickle each other and laugh harder yet.
For Andi, there’s so much to do all the time. I think of what Brother David Steindl-Rast said, “Leisure is not the privilege of those who have time, but rather the virtue of those who give to each instant of life the time it deserves.” When we visit and Margaret holds Finn, Andi gets busy with everything else, because all the rest of the time, she carries Finn around in his sling, close to her heart. Close to God’s heart, too.
This is the most peaceful, contemplative time in her life. Ron Rolheiser wrote about her, and all mothers, in a book he called Domestic Monastery: Creating A Spiritual life at Home. “The mother home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. And her constant contact with young children gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild and learn empathy and unselfishness.”
I put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland for my people to drink, the people who I formed for myself, that they might announce my praise.
2026, today!
So much to say on this Easter Monday, Andi’s 40th birthday. At our gathering Sunday we prayed, laughed, ate, played Cranium. Aki prayed a beautiful prayer over his wife, blessing her with confidence in the touch of Jesus. Kids played, 9, nearly 7 and 1 (Miles, Jasper and Finn) we shared stories around the table of significant events and mentors in our lives. All four of the kids’ grandparents were there, and we sang Happy Birthday together.
(Acts 2, Psalm 16, Psalm 118, Matthew 28)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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