God’s children begin as soft as a holly blossom, turning blood red as its berry, fully surrounded by prickly leaves.
Christ was sent to bleed like us for us, to wear a thorny crown and bear wounds by smoothing over all our sharp edges.
For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you? Indeed, you are our glory and joy. 1 Thessalonians 2: 19-20
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The Incarnation is like a wave of the sea which, rushing up on the flat beach, runs out, even thinner and more transparent, and does not return to its source but sinks into the sand and disappears. ~Hans Urs von Balthasar from Origen: Spirit and Fire
When the heart is full of joy, it always allows its joy to escape. It is like the fountain in the marketplace; whenever it is full it runs away in streams, and so soon as it ceases to overflow, you may be quite sure that it has ceased to be full. The only full heart is the overflowing heart. ~Charles Spurgeon from The Spurgeon Series 1857 & 1858: Unabridged Sermons In Modern Language
…continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. Colossians 2: 6b-7
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13
photo by Nate Gibson at Sendai, Japan
May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. 1 Thessalonians 3:12
I do not think that skies and meadows are Moral, or that the fixture of a star Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees Have wisdom in their windless silences. Yet these are things invested in my mood With constancy, and peace, and fortitude, That in my troubled season I can cry Upon the wide composure of the sky, And envy fields, and wish that I might be As little daunted as a star or tree. ~John Drinkwater “Reciprocity”
I’m first class in the category of overflowing tears.
My family knows it doesn’t take much to make me cry: saying goodbye, saying hello, listening to a childrens’ choir singing, a heartstring-tugging show on TV, the whistled “Greensleeves” theme to the old Lassie series, not to mention the whistled theme to the old “Leave it to Beaver” or “Andy Griffith” series–you name it, whistling does it.
Yesterday, instead of weeping overly sentimental tears, it was tears of relief that our country peacefully managed a transition of power – something that was very nearly thwarted four years ago. On that day, I wept tears of anger at scenes of violence coming from the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.
Undaunted, I know God our Father remains a boundless deep source of all that is good and just in troubled times, constantly refilling the love of the Savior who seeks us out, while His Spirit flows into us like water into the sand.
We who weep will never empty.
Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have cross’d the bar. ~Lord Alfred Tennyson “Crossing the Bar”
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It is precisely because we are weary, and poor in spirit, that God can touch us with hope. This is not an easy truth. It means that we do accept our common lot, and take up our share of the cross. It means that we do not gloss over the evils we confront every day, both within ourselves and without. Our sacrifices may be great.
But as the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, once said, it is only the poor and hungry, those who know they need someone to come on their behalf, who can celebrate Christmas. We can ask for courage, however, and trust that God has not led us into this new land only to abandon us there. ~Kathleen Norrisfrom God With Us
photo by Joel DeWaard
On Epiphany day, we are still the people walking. We are still people in the dark, and the darkness looms large around us, beset as we are by fear, anxiety, brutality, violence, loss — a dozen alienations that we cannot manage.
We are — we could be — people of your light. So we pray for the light of your glorious presence as we wait for your appearing; we pray for the light of your wondrous grace as we exhaust our coping capacity; we pray for your gift of newness that will override our weariness; we pray that we may see and know and hear and trust in your good rule.
That we may have energy, courage, and freedom to enact your rule through the demands of this day. We submit our day to you and to your rule, with deep joy and high hope. ~Walter Brueggemann from Prayers for a Privileged People
When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart. ~Howard Thurman from The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations
O God, who am I now? Once, I was secure
in familiar territory in my sense of belonging
unquestioning of
the norms of my culture the assumptions built into my language the values shared by my society.
But now you have called me out and away from home and I do not know where you are leading. I am empty, unsure, uncomfortable. I have only a beckoning star to follow.
Journeying God, pitch your tent with mine so that I may not become deterred by hardship, strangeness, doubt. Show me the movement I must make
toward a wealth not dependent on possessions toward a wisdom not based on books toward a strength not bolstered by might toward a God not confined to heaven
All the Advent anticipation is over, Christmas and New Years are now past. Today is Epiphany, when I regret my energy and courage is waning just as the work of Christmas must begin.
I’ve swept up the last of the fir needles that dropped to the floor from a lovely Christmas tree that I watered faithfully in the house for over two weeks. But no amount of water could sustain what is rootless.
So it is with us.
I too am drying up, parts of me left behind for others to sweep up. I too must have roots of faith to survive in a troubled world.
The real work of Christmas is year-long — often very hard intensive work, not always the fun stuff of the last month, yet needed in the brokenness of hunger, disease, conflict, war and random violence, poverty, addictions, depression and pain.
We don’t need full stockings on the hearth, Christmas villages on the side table, or a blinking star on the top of the tree to reflect on the comfort of God’s care and the astounding beauty of His creation, all available to us without batteries, electrical plug ins, or the need of a ladder.
The real work of Christmas is God manifest on earth – “scandalously earthed” – in our own lives. We recognize Him in the homeless and forgotten. We are made alive to the possibility that we can make a difference in His name, to walk in others’ shoes, just as He walks in ours.
Every day. Twelve months. Life long.
Are we ready?
Unclench your fists Hold out your hands. Take mine. Let us hold each other. Thus is his Glory Manifest. ~Madeleine L’Engle “Epiphany”
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May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God. May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Nate and Ben and brand new baby LeaDaddy and Lea
Mommy and Lea
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
Just checking to see if she is real…
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night thirty-two years ago, but still no labor came as it should. Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. When a neighbor came to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow. Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. You beat even more slowly, threatening to let go your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my aging and failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm and dug out from a drift: I celebrate when I hear your voice singing- your students love you as their teacher and mentor, you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of a night of drifting snow.
My annual retelling of the most remarkable day of my life thirty-two years ago today when our daughter Eleanor (“Lea”) Sarah Gibson was born in an emergency C-section, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a wind and snow storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her.
She is married to her true love Brian– he is another blessing sent from the Lord. Together they have their own miracle child, happily born in the middle of the summer rather than snow-drift season.
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Each year I mark one lone outstanding tree, Clad in its robings of the summer past, Dry, wan, and shivering in the wintry blast. It will not pay the season’s rightful fee,— It will not set its frost-burnt leafage free; But like some palsied miser all aghast, Who hoards his sordid treasure to the last, It sighs, it moans, it sings in eldritch glee. A foolish tree, to dote on summers gone; A faithless tree, that never feels how spring Creeps up the world to make a leafy dawn, And recompense for all despoilment bring! Oh, let me not, heyday and youth withdrawn, With failing hands to their vain semblance cling! ~Edith Matilda Thomas “Winter Leafage”
Decades ago, while I worked as a nurses’ aide in a nursing home, I cared for a little slip of a lady almost 100 years of age who would not go down the hall to breakfast without her make up on. Wearing makeup was more important than putting on clothing to her, so our daily morning routine was prolonged considerably as she meticulously penciled over her invisible eyebrows, caked on powder on her forehead, nose and cheeks to cover the wrinkles, and tremulously applied a wavy thick border of red lipstick on her thin lips.
I tried to tell her how lovely she was without a mask on, how her well-worn skin deserved to be seen and admired, how her eyes shone more brightly without crumbling mascara on non-existent eyelashes. She would have none of it. She had never appeared in public without her makeup since her teenage years, and she was not about to start now.
She clung to the fading leaves of her youth, holding on with all her might to what she believed kept her beautiful, so she continued to preserve her “frost-burnt leafage” by covering up her translucent wrinkles.
She died quietly in her sleep one night. My morning duty was to prepare her body for the coming mortician. I washed her lovely face clean for the last time, admiring her without the makeup cover, appreciating each wrinkle’s fold and crevice, knowing she now was made new in a leafy dawn I could only imagine.
The mortician would do what was needed to dress her up to her specifications. But now I had seen the beauty underneath.
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May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out. ~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
This is a song in praise of hard, dark nights: no firelight, no afterglow, but the sliver of a crescent moon and a few stray stars flung out into the wilderness, calling you into the great Alone with your animal self, falling down on tired knees broken against the ground. Then prostrate— cross-like— face down and stretched to the end of yourself by how wrong you’ve been— because, of course, this is the end.
But there is still some warmth coming up from the Earth, and a humming in the sweet black air— some great vibration of life that goes out before you. And though you can’t see them, the birchwood and pines rustle inside the wind’s divine pull— in a dance of wills— and somewhere, a great horned owl bellows his clear, determined hoot like a psalm across the land.
So, you learn to breathe, again, with his heralding— a rhythm that beats electric blue like a pulse: “It’s not the end— it’s not the end—”
No, this is not the end— hardly an end, but a hard beginning. There will always be a morning— a rebirth.
So, here in the dark— in a night bleaker than bleak— in a time outside of time— there is a mark on the Holy map of your soul where you found your Maker in the hard, dark night— and then lived to see the light of dawn. ~Kimberly Phinney “An Ode to Hard, Dark Nights”
So many seem lost without a map, unable to find their way in the dark, wrecked and wandering, weeping and wretched, believing they have come to the end.
Yet this is not the end, only the beginning. A hard start – all rebirths are hard.
As I have been shown mercy, so I must become mercy, be loving where others show hate, be giving when others take away, build up while others tear down.
We walk together in the emerging light – it’s right there – on God’s holy map of your soul.
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Everything remembers something. The rock, its fiery bed, cooling and fissuring into cracked pieces, the rub of watery fingers along its edge.
The cloud remembers being elephant, camel, giraffe, remembers being a veil over the face of the sun, gathering itself together for the fall.
The turtle remembers the sea, sliding over and under its belly, remembers legs like wings, escaping down the sand under the beaks of savage birds.
The tree remembers the story of each ring, the years of drought, the floods, the way things came walking slowly towards it long ago.
And the skin remembers its scars, and the bone aches where it was broken. The feet remember the dance, and the arms remember lifting up the child.
The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away, everything it lost and found again, and everyone it loved, the heart cannot forget. ~Joyce Sutphen “What the Heart Cannot Forget” from Coming Back to the Body
The main thing is this– when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning. Then talk softly to your heart, don’t yell. Say anything but be respectful. Say–maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember. ~Grace Paley from “The Art of Growing Older” in Just As I Thought
Approaching seventy, she learns to live, at last. She realizes she has not accomplished half of what she struggled for, that she surrendered too many battles and seldom celebrated those she won. Approaching seventy, she learns to live without ambition: a calm lake face, not a train bound for success and glory. For the first time, she relaxes her hands on the controls, leans back to watch the coming end. Asked, she’d tell you her life is made out of the things she didn’t do, as much as the things she did do. Did she sing a love song? Approaching seventy, she learns to live without wanting much more than the light in the catbird window seat where, watching the voracious fist-sized tweets, she hums along. ~Marilyn Nelson “Bird Feeder”
I’ve relaxed my grip on the controls on the runaway train of ambition. This is a change for someone driven for decades to succeed in various professional and personal roles.
Who I am is defined by what I haven’t gotten done and what I managed to do. And now, at seventy, I hope I still have some time to explore some of those things I left undone.
I want to remember those who I wish were still here, their time over.
Reflecting to my grandchildren the calm I feel. Holding my own heart gently and treasuring theirs. Humming as I go. Just sitting when I wish to. Watching out the window. Loving up those still around me.
My heart remembers. It won’t forget. It is sweet to still have some time.
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No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. ~Charles Lamb, 1897
Every morn is the world made new. You who are weary of sorrow and sinning, Here is a beautiful hope for you,— A hope for me and a hope for you.
All the past things are past and over; The tasks are done and the tears are shed. Yesterday’s errors let yesterday cover; Yesterday’s wounds, which smarted and bled, Are healed with the healing which night has shed.
Yesterday now is a part of forever, Bound up in a sheaf, which God holds tight, With glad days, and sad days, and bad days, which never Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight, Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.
Let them go, since we cannot re-live them, Cannot undo and cannot atone; God in his mercy receive, forgive them! Only the new days are our own; To-day is ours, and to-day alone.
Here are the skies all burnished brightly, Here is the spent earth all re-born, Here are the tired limbs springing lightly To face the sun and to share with the morn In the chrism of dew and the cool of dawn.
Every day is a fresh beginning; Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain, And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning, And puzzles forecasted and possible pain, Take heart with the day, and begin again. ~Susan Coolidge “New Every Morning”
Each morn is New Year’s morn come true, Morn of a festival to keep. All nights are sacred nights to make Confession and resolve and prayer; All days are sacred days to wake New gladness in the sunny air. Only a night from old to new; Only a sleep from night to morn. The new is but the old come true; Each sunrise sees a new year born. ~Helen Hunt Jackson from “New Year’s Morning”
The year’s at the spring, And day’s at the morn; Morning’s at seven; The hill-side’s dew-pearled; The lark’s on the wing; The snail’s on the thorn; God’s in his Heaven— All’s right with the world! ~Robert Browning “The Year’s at the Spring”
We each celebrate a birthday on New Year’s Day, a bright beginning after so much darkness, a still life nativity born in a winter garden – He who was and is and is to come: He who gives us another chance to make it right.
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And a few favorite AI images created for my Barnstorming posts – I like to see whether computers are understanding, through an artistic interpretation, what I’m trying to say.
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The Old Year’s gone away To nothingness and night: We cannot find him all the day Nor hear him in the night: He left no footstep, mark or place In either shade or sun: The last year he’d a neighbour’s face, In this he’s known by none.
All nothing everywhere: Mists we on mornings see Have more of substance when they’re here And more of form than he. He was a friend by every fire, In every cot and hall— A guest to every heart’s desire, And now he’s nought at all.
Old papers thrown away, Old garments cast aside, The talk of yesterday, Are things identified; But time once torn away No voices can recall: The eve of New Year’s Day Left the Old Year lost to all. ~John Clare “The Old Year”
Every morning, cup of coffee in hand, I look out at the mountain. Ordinarily it’s blue, but today it’s the color of an eggplant.
I study the cat’s face and find a trace of white around each eye, as if he made himself up today for a part in the opera. ~Jane Kenyon from “In Several Colors”
If you notice anything it leads you to notice more and more.
And anyway I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that.
If I stopped the pain was unbearable.
If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t be saved, the pain was unbearable. ~Mary Oliver from “The Moths” from Dream Work
As the old year ends, although I love routine, I try to see and do things in a new way, to hang on to what is memorable and let go of what is best forgotten.
My attempts to put a shine on an ordinary year feel futile in a messed-up upside-down world.
The effort can be painful: it means getting muddy in the muck of news and conflict, falling down again and again and trying to get back up.
If I stop getting dirty, if I abandon salvage and renewal, I give up on God’s promise to see the world changed.
God hands me a broom, a shovel and cleaning rags, so I can keep at my efforts into the new year – transforming the old and the ornery and the ordinary into something shiny and new and truly extraordinary.
photo by Nate Gibson
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