Here we are on day 7 of Advent and I cannot help but think of high school choir. Mrs. Weatherly stretched our 70s-pop-radio-station minds and voices when she pulled out the rugged old copies of Handel’s Messiah (1741) and taught us several numbers. At first it seemed nearly like a foreign language, but over the course of rehearsals, we came to love it, our delivery getting better, more crisp and mature. The thrill of it was getting to perform at midnight mass on Christmas Eve at the big Catholic church in town – way outside “my” church walls.
This was December 2011…how quickly they grow…
I’ve only attended a couple of full-fledged performances of traditional Messiah performances and have never managed to get to see Young Messiah (yes, they found a way to make it pop), but each time was a musical thrill and how happy I am when I can hear and quietly sing along on complicated parts (alto and second soprano) I can still remember from high school.
Comfort Ye
First the more traditional version with a full symphony if you’re up for a beautiful musical adventure. If not, I have included a second version from the The New Young Messiah (what? “young” wasn’t good enough already?!), a more contemporary rendition. It doesn’t matter how you listen, it IS the good news and a promise from God that our sins were being forgiven! Oh, yes!
Comfort ye, comfort ye My people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to
Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her
iniquity is pardoned. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,
prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. (Isaiah 40:1-3)
I love that the God of the universe, the just and True God, the God of Righteousness and holiness still looks at us in our mess of living and says these words which have marked this year for me,
I already used this song Sunday, a Francesca Battistelli version, but it is so beautiful and totally embodies the whole thing about Advent. (Just as a humorous sidenote, Catholic Online uses a Wikipedia definition of what Advent is, haha). I am still learning. Should have known to go straight to Wikipedia. Kinda funny!
The Piano Guys are awesome and have a really festive “Angels We Have Heard on High” video making the rounds these days, but this rendition of O Come, O Come Emmanuel is just exquisite {- exquisite} and will bring you peace for the weekend. At the end they have a link to a special Christmas version of it. In case once isn’t enough (and it wasn’t for me).
O come, Thou Day-Spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
Stop what you’re doing. Put that long list of things to do away. Listen, shhhhh….listen by candlelight and pray it, too,
O Come, Emmanuel…
NOTE: These photos are some of the unedited (or at least unfinished) pictures we didn’t use on the 2010 Christmas card. Four cameras going, less than 30 minutes start to finish includes getting the kids out of the car and into the cold, dressed, bringing all the animals in and snapping like wild. Later a lovely card and “Baby Jesus” (depicted by little Miss Sawyer) was suddenly wearing blue. ;) But this? Is what is REALLY looked like! Haha.
“Advent as a season is meant to make the journey toward Christmas full of meaning; it’s meant to put us touch with our deepest longings and greatest hopes; it’s meant to teach us to bring all our desires together on one object: Christ. While “Christmas” as a season (properly) begins on December 25 and goes twelve days (yes, there’s a song about that!) until January 6th, Advent is all about the build-up to it. It begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and takes us right up to the glorious celebration of the incarnation.” -Glenn Packiam
So, we just passed the first Sunday of Advent. This first week traditionally, at least so I am reading, is all about the Patriarchs and Old Testament figures from God creating the heavens and the earth, the fall into sin with Adam and Eve, through the lives of Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the promised is being revealed and God’s great plan of salvation is put into motion. So much happened to get a Savior to us, those whom God so loves, didn’t it?
So today, I chose a Phillips, Craig and Dean song (Dave loves them), Shine on Us. It is prayerful, an invitation of all God is to come and just be welcomed in us, on us, around us. Go sit in the light of your Christmas tree and listen for 4 minutes, and pray it. Then receive it.
Well – have you heard? Our home was featured in a Houzz Ideabook. Yes, it happened. Thank-you. Thank-you very much.
Saw this in my inbox this morning!
Nevermind that it was only a photograph and “fix” we used to stop a roaring vibration sound from the microwave temporarily and is being lightheartedly referred to (by some Houzz users) as a “hillbilly fix.” Also pay no mind to the title of the whole Ideabook including the words “nutty,” “home,” and “fixes” in it. Yes, just nevermind those things.
Instead bask with us in the warm glow of our delighted surprise upon discovery this morning that one of my top two Houzz contributors chose to use our little image at the top of her Ideabook. Thank-you, Becky Harris.
So, I just feel like today, as the temp is dropping, a nice, upbeat, dancing number is in order (just to keep us warm, for crying out loud). So we’ll listen, sing with, and dance to:
Filled with Your Glory by Starfield
Stephanie took this shot of our 6 grandbebes last Christmas. Now we habe 8. Soon…
I love the powerful imagery created by the words: Angels and men adore, mountains bow and oceans roar. Creation longs for what’s in store… Well, YES! Don’t you just have the sense that we’re all really pretty well sunk if the LORD does not show up and fill the earth with His very Glory – just like the water fills the sea? I think Creation is crying out for His Presence and Glory and we better do that, too. Though we live in so much light (because {Jesus} the LIGHT came), we sure are managing to embrace living that darkens the future for our planet, for nations, for the hearts and souls of children. Arise and shine, people of God, for the glory of the LORD is risen upon you!
I’m kind of with the ocean on this one: maybe we need to be letting out a roar for His glory!
Isaiah 11:1 “Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit.”
Remember – I do not come from high-church tradition, so I am muddling along – looking for ways to observe this season in meaningful ways. You can google-search and learn all about Jesse Trees {here is one}. But I have decided to stop for a few minutes daily and listen to a song and meditate on all Jesus came to do via lyric and melody.
O Christmas Tree.
I love the trees of Christmas. I love lights on them and sparkly ornaments that reflect the light (isn’t the spiritual connection just so obvious?). I love that the trees are evergreens. Because everything about all of it that my mom or Sunday School teachers ever taught me? I believe, still and I am reminded and renewed in my gratefulness for the Savior annually.
My Christmas tree’s branches are green, representing the eternal life Jesus’s death and resurrection made available to us. But if you stripped away the needles and greenery to the bare trunk and you attached a large branch across, you’d seen the barren tree of a curse where God once hung His greatest gift to us. Jesus wasn’t the gift under the tree, but the gift on a tree.
So annually, we plop a tree up in the living room and string it with lights to remember and observe. This will never be a pagan ritual for me. It will ever and always symbolize a Savior, redemption from the curse and green-everlasting and eternal life.
So, pondering this today, I thought of another scripture I love so much. It speaks to the things that come to try to take our freedom from the curse of sin and death. It speaks to the heartbreak of broken relationships and addictions or any gut-wrenching pain that has invaded our homes. It brings hope to the heaviness of our past which may try to rest on us, and against those things that tear our families apart. It promises hope and healing for the diseased and iniquities. There is hope for a tree, it says in Job:
“At least there is hope for a tree: If it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its new shoots will not fail. Its roots may grow old in the ground and its stump die in the soil, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth shoots like a plant.” Job 14.7-9
Is this good news, or what? You know it’s true. You know a tree can be struck by lightning, mangled by a runaway car or chopped down by a property owner. It can seem totally defeated by age and bad care, but suddenly, after a rain, new shoots!
So the song I listened to today, to give me that short, song-length reprieve from all the other innumerable things there are to do, is an old Kent Henry song, “Lord I Live by Your Word.”
So many scriptures use the tree as imagery. The Tree of Life in Genesis shows up again in the last chapter of Revelation. Jesus is the way to God, He is the Living Word, the Tree of Life. And in my living room, there is a green tree filled with lights reminding me that the long awaited Savior did all He came to do – in an everlasting way!
When I started blogging on November 29, 2006 {seven years ago today}, I only had three grandbebes. I tried to make the first post lighthearted to cover up a pretty dark time in which I was seeing much of my life’s “work” as a total waste, my churchy-ness/ministry as being much too motivated by the fear of man (“The fear of man is a snare“), rather than by love and basically realizing what a Pharisee I had been. Pride. It was not a pretty sight. But I thought I’d just write into “the air,” sneak in some confessions about my ridiculousness and and hope people only read the cute grandbebe stories.
First blog ever, called “Top Ten Reasons I’m Blogging Now”
I’ve told on myself a thousand times since then. And haven’t told on myself thousands of times because, geesh, I wouldn’t want anyone to know how thoroughly rotten I can be.
It took me two months into the blog to really say the shocking thing out loud, that I was mourning loss. My heart palpitated as I pressed “publish.” I laugh now, because I wasn’t very transparent. {{see here}}
Then I confessed to my prideful religiousness. Dung happens. {{see here}}
And I shan’t show you all my yuck-stuff, but I wrote about how I know that “It takes one to know one” is true. Bleh. {{see here}}
Lots has changed since I started this blog. I have 8 grandbebes now. Almost nine. I’m older, sweeter {*ahem}, less certain of my once rock-solid-strong opinions and I’m much more hopeful for all the days I have left than worried over the ones I have lost. Though I haven’t aced life’s testings, I am pretty happy with my grade. I {{love}} so much more now than I did then, I am more grateful for my heritage and so thankful for all the people along the way who have touched my life and altered its course and blessed me so much. My family has grown by leaps and bounds and songs are in my heart again. I had tomatoes from my garden at my Thanksgiving table (first time in years) and I am learning to receive the {completely unmerited, but so freely given} love of the Father, rather than just trying to work my tail off impressing Him.
One thing that hasn’t changed and likely never will? My blog posts are too stinking long and I cannot curb my wordiness. That is just how it is. I thought I’d have run out of all the silly nothings that spill out of my brain and heart and onto the screen. But I haven’t. More words to come. Thanks for those of you who stop by and read. I LOVE that!!! :)
Here is the thing~
Here at my Thought Collage, I have tried to say, in a million ways, God is faithful. He is so faithful. Please promise me you’ll always-always-always look past me to Him and don’t ever let anything I have done or said disappoint you in the Everlasting Father. Because- He. is. Faithful. For sure. Forever!
So, on the occasion of the 7th anniversary of my very first blog post ever~
I get melancholy in the fall. I fall in love with the smells and sights and sounds and the changing leaves. It is ridiculous. But true. Below are parts of a few different things I mentioned about fall and the autumn leaves along the way…
Glory. That is the color of fall. What started green and bright and light, unfurling after a stark winter, now reaches its’ full and most beautiful stage, and having held on with strength and determination throughout the summer, through both drought and drenching rains, now falls, now tumbles. Now, peacefully and content with itself, dances right down before me, a gift. Glory. {{READ ENTIRE POST HERE}}
I feel things more deeply at this ripe and fruitful time of my life. I feel like a full-grown woman, as opposed to some foolish girl, a woman who knows her mind and risks her thunderous-beating heart to more vulnerability and tenderness than I’d have allowed when younger. And my experience in life and love and heartbreak and second chances have made me more deeply passionate and compassionate and warm. I’m old enough now to understand the rich treasure my nurturing provides for those who are lucky enough to be planted in my heart and the wildly increased ability I now have to love. {{SEE FULL POST HERE}}
I have chased autumn into a Missouri mood that lingers like musk on my skin. I have escaped to turning-leaves on proud trees and the deep intensity of autumn colors that hold both the memory of exuberant youth with its’ fresh, green-spring growth, and the exploding red-to-the-core ripeness of the late summer tomato, now seasoned to a complex beauty, indisputably richer and wiser for the aging. The blazing urgency of the season, so much to experience before it all passes into winter, is salty on my tongue. I inhale the cinnamon-scented air, and taste the pungent, spicy and intangible gift of the equinox while the crickets sing that haunting song I have always loved.
Burnt sienna and ochre rustle restlessly as autumn falls and the cool night air sprinkles wet diamonds onto my keyboard and into my mouth filling my lungs with cool, brisk air and enduring toasted warmth at once. Halley’s Comet spilled burning meteor fragments in the wee hours, punctuating the night sky with light, a spectacle for late-night lovers young and old. {{SEE FULL POST HERE}}
Hey, remember the meteor showers that year? CLICK HERE
I got to spend the weekend at the Powers family cabin near Peaceful Valley in the Rocky Mountains (thank-you! thank-you! thank-you!). For over 11 hours on Saturday, I sat near the rushing river tumbling down boulders and powering it’s way through fallen branches and sharp rocks in dappled sunlight that warmed my skin while the gentlest of breezes brought cool refreshment. I read and sang and thought and rested and listened and wondered and cried and smiled and prayed. In that setting, you cannot help but be drawn into spontaneous conversations with God. The evergreens, greatly varied in their hues, all strong and tall were punctuated by Aspens I am certain I could actually see changing color before my eyes – a bit more colorful hour by hour.
The underbrush, having gotten an earlier start is already deep oranges and reds, even browns and purples. Brilliant berries are being found out by small birds which, having swiped a treasure as such from the bush quickly flies to a needle-rich pine branch nearby and looks for all the world as if I have just opened a Christmas card…”Oh! May the God of green-hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing-lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!” (That’s in The Message, Romans 15) {{SEE ENTIRE POST HERE}}
Then just some miscellaneous quotes about the fall season from various blog posts:
“I like October for the crimson and pumpkin, for the eggplant and rust, and all the colors of the deepening, mature, lusty, whole and passionate part of the year when the autumn moon hangs heavy in the sky like the warm embraces of a tattered, weighty quilt sewn years ago for the need of heat and not some contest of a county fair. Have you ever been covered in one of those?” {{10.22.13}}
“Today is mostly yellow with a smattering of red, turning into deep wine by late afternoon. A steady falling of leaves with a call for possible white-flakes on Thursday afternoon and a blast of cold-blue air which will effectively ruin the perfectly coiffed-in-color hues for Autumn 2012.” {{10.23.12}}
October is orange. Of course. But it is also a red that is so full of depth and dimension and fiery-variance it can hardly be described.
My neighbor’s Maple has languoriously (not a real word, I know), gone from deep late-summer green, the leaves still fully affixed due to mild fall days and nights, to a light-to-deepening golden peach-to-orange over the past week. Then yesterday, I swear, as I walked back into the family room with a hot cup of coffee, it went red. Just like that, before my eyes. It nearly took my breath away. Moments before, a glowing, lovely amber-rusty orange, then, poof.
Red. A fully florid, cherry, sanguine scarlet. A puce, a rufescent russet, a bloody, blushing, gushing, infrared hot pink mixed with flaming chestnut and rubies and gleaming copper, all at once. It is shimmering and iridescent fuchsia, yet dense and heavy garnet, a ruby. It is bittersweet in both color and the evoking of raw autumn melancholy. [So, it’s red, right?] {{10.17.11}}
My mom and I were drinking coffee on the deck this morning and enjoying the rustling leaves in their fall coat-of-many-colors. Autumn is romantic. This is from my mama’s heart and mind:
“The butterflies are taking one last dance across the meadow. Please hurry back, I’ll see you in the spring…” -Norma Moslander {{10.21.09}}
I quite obviously become a waterfall of words come autumn. This year has been splendid! Good job, Autumn!
It’s been two years since the beautiful, small, intimate, but huge-with-love-and-meaning wedding. It was a lovely day and a beautiful night and the whole family, from near and far, from his and hers, chipped in and celebrated and served and rejoiced.
We got a new son. Tredessa had waited a long time, doing Kingdom work, serving and working for God, waiting, waiting and then: Ryan. Ryan? He got a most amazing girl, our 3rd daughter – the best thing we could have shared with him.
Happy Anniversary, sweet ones. What a lovely year you’re having. Soon – the fruit of your love (due in 20 days!) and you are radiant, both of you. You are wearing love well. So well.
Ay-yi-yi…this blog-o-ver-sary is telling on me TOO much! Not only have I gushed over God’s great love and faithfulness towards us and simply melted in sappy, love-oozy words about these grandbebes who call me Nonna, I have also laid bare my junk and my faults and confessed my regrets and sorrow over everything I meant to do, tried to do, FAILED to do…with epic grandeur. I do, at least, have some pride at that. If you are going to fail, fail REALLY badly, –really, really badly.
In its’ own way, that is also wholehearted living, n’est ce pas?
Baby books. The records of first teeth emerging and the brilliance of the first roll-over from back to tummy and the first ma-ma or da-da. Who wouldn’t record every single second of these life-altering moments with extemporaneous memorandums? Who?! Well, me…and oh my, the regrets it has brought me, as proven by various blog posts from the past seven years.
Who will buy this beautiful morning and put it in a box for me?
So I can see it at my leisure, whenever things go wrong.
And I can keep it as a treasure to last my whole life long?”
I failed my children in baby-booking. I did. I just stunk at it. Their entire lives, the guilt of the knowledge that I had not filled out the dates on the teeth-cutting-arrival charts gnawed at me relentlessly. Pages with the words paste photo here nakedly jeered at me, taunting my inability to create a wondrously meaningful book for posterity.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have photos to paste. It wasn’t that I didn’t delight at the clink of the spoon on a newly emerged tooth or want to remember every single, tiny moment of their first days. I saved everything for each of my children from the second I knew they were coming. It was almost a sickness, induced, I fear, by having a parent who saved nothing. We took untold thousands of photos of these 5 incredible children. They were also often undeveloped for a really long time.
But somehow, I just didn’t do well at putting things in their books. I think my perfectionistic tendencies (aka my all-or-nothing sickness) interfered. “Today I must focus entirely on the babybook and fill in each line and glue the proper photos as directed,” was my heart’s desire, but didn’t happen, couldn’t happen, because life was happening. When you are deeply involved in your husband’s ministry, right at his side AND almost annually producing a new human being, leisure time to cut and paste and record gets put on the back burner – or in my case, books safely tucked into their original boxes, high on a closet shelf.
The other day my daughter Stephanie kind of snickered that when I’d presented her baby book to her there was nothing in it. I guess I thought maybe “the thought” would count. “Yeah-there is nothing there, but look at this beautiful book I was thinking about fixing up for you!?” Stephanie has Gemma’s babybook close by, on top of the television armoire and is a really good baby-booker. She obviously did not inherit this from… {{READ MORE HERE}}…
“THE CHOSEN TREASURE OF YOUR HEART ~ To my children – What do with this stuff…
I know receiving all these odds and ends and bits and pieces of your lives may cause you to wonder: what am I suppose to do with all this stuff? And why is mom giving back to me the things I made for her as a kid?
Well, I am keeping plenty of little momentos and scraps myself. As you know, I am hard at work cataloguing our lives, creating a chronicle of the adventures that we have enjoyed. I am placing everything in books that I can pull out at a moment’s notice and peruse and enjoy, but I am simplifying at this stage in my life. I hope the fact that I have held onto these things for so many years will speak to you of the importance they have had in my heart.
As I have prepared to give these things to you, I have looked at every single item again. I have touched each memory, smiled and cried over piece after piece of our family history. There were little scribble drawings and coupons you gave me along with your incredible artwork and report cards filled with teacher’s notes (nearly always good!), and it is all so precious to me. Now I hope you can enjoy it, too…
…Memories are a tough thing sometimes. They can play tricks on us. At [48], I have made a decision to spend the last half of my life remembering the good stuff, the laughs, the successes, the wins – my chosen treasures. This is why I am cataloguing the blessed life I have been given. I am remembering the goodness of the Lord, the heritage He gave me, the legacy He is allowing me to leave. I am recalling His provision and His confidence in me to be your mother.
