Time does not stop

How can two weeks go by so quickly?

Not only did time not stop, it flew.

Even though we were just getting ready for Christmas (just washing the Thanksgiving dishes it seems like), now we are preparing to welcome in the new year on the road, to reflect and celebrate together.  The new year! 

We will lift glasses of bubbly, play killer speed scrabble, hopefully get to play in some snow, and enjoy the time we have together. 

And while some are watching the Rose Parade and every possible bowl game on New Years Day, I will go further north to take Madelaine back to school.

Goodbyes are not getting any easier, but maybe time will move as quickly this quarter as it did during these precious two weeks together?  I can only hope and pray.

But tonight we celebrate, laugh, give thanks, and celebrate some more.

Happy New Year to you!

The Friday Clive

"You needn't worry about not feeling brave. Our Lord didn't - see the scene in Gethsemane. How thankful I am that when God became man He did not choose to become a man of iron nerves; that would not have helped weaklings like you and me nearly so much."

Christmas photo shoot

Setting the stage.

Waiting.

(Or being a totem pole.  Not sure.)

Um.

Nice.

Nice again.  

The annual, "How do I use this timer feature?" challenge.

Not like this!

Merry Christmas!

And the crowd goes wild.

The Friday Clive

Among the ox (like an ox I'm slow)

I see a glory in the stable grow

Which, with the ox's dullness might at length

Give me an ox's strength.

Among the asses (stubborn I as they)

I see my Savior where I looked for hay;

So may my beastlike folly learn at least

The patience of a beast.

Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)

I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;

Oh that my baa-ing nature would thence

Some woolly innocence!

Smiles

Another debate year has begun, and so has the success.

Well done, son!

And well done, Auburn Debate Club!

The shortest day of the year

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.

by Susan Cooper
(HT: Donna, via wonderful Quiet Life Comment Section member Jep)

It is hard to believe that yesterday was the shortest day of the year. When I am sick, time does not fly. And when I am sick and I haven't finished my Christmas shopping and I am on the couch and unable to blow my nose even though I should be able to blow my nose for an hour without running out of a reason for blowing my nose? Well let's just say I totally forgot that it was the shortest day of the year.

But it was. And today, as I finally dragged my slug body out to get a few more things done before Christmas, I realized how hard it is for me to remember that life will not always be what it is right now. When I am sick, I cannot imagine being well. When it is raining, I cannot imagine that the sun will shine again.

But yesterday was the shortest day of the year, which means that today is longer. And tomorrow will be longer. Time passes, things change. I might even feel better tomorrow. I might actually be done with Christmas shopping before Christmas. These are all very encouraging facts.


And now the days start tipping toward the light, toward length of days and summer's warmth. And even though today is another rainy day, and I still can't blow my nose, and I have to do my Christmas shopping despite how I feel, I am filled with thoughts of light and hope.

The people walking in darkness 

have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness 

a light has dawned. 

Isaiah 9:2

I love ...

these girls.  So much.

Twenty-five years ago today...

...there was a young man and a young woman on a beach in Montara, California. The sun had set, the picnic dinner had been delicious, and they were talking about their recently discovered differences. The young man concluded the discussion with, "Well, that doesn't seem insurmountable. Want to marry me?" At first the young woman thought he had said, "Isn't it a merry evening?", but it quickly became clear that The Question had been popped. An enthusiastic "yes" was the answer, and here we are twenty-five years later.

~Not quite twenty-five years ago~

So much changes in twenty-five years, but after all this time I am more aware than ever that saying yes to this man was the best decision I would ever make.  I am grateful.

~2010~

The Fourth Sunday in Advent

I am not worthy, O Lord and Master, that You should enter under the roof of my soul; but since You in Your love for men do will to dwell in me, I take courage and approach. You command I will open wide the doors which You alone did create, that You may enter with love as is Your nature, enter and enlighten my darkened thought. I believe that You will do this, for You did not banish the Harlot who approached You with tears, nor did You reject the Publican who repented, nor did You drive away the Thief who acknowledged Your Kingdom, nor did You leave the repentant persecutor (Paul) to himself; but all who had been brought to You by repentance You did set in the company of Your friends, O You Who alone are blessed always, now and to endless ages. Amen.

~St. John Chrysostom~

God With Us

A sign shall be given

A virgin will conceive

A human baby bearing

Undiminished deity

The glory of the nations

A light for all to see

That hope for all who will embrace

His warm reality

Immanuel

Our God is with us

And if God is with us

Who could stand against us

Our God is with us

Immanuel

For all those who live in the shadow of death

A glorious light has dawned

For all those who stumble in the darkness

Behold your light has come

Immanuel

Our God is with us

And if God is with us

Who could stand against us

Our God is with us

Immanuel

So what will be your answer?

Will you hear the call?

Of Him who did not spare His son

But gave him for us all

On earth there is no power

There is no depth or height

That could ever separate us

From the love of God in Christ

Immanuel

Our God is with us

And if God is with us

Who could stand against us

Our God is with us

Immanuel

Immanuel

by Michael Card

from the album Joy in the Journey

"The implications of the name 'Immanuel' are both comforting and unsettling. Comforting, because He has come to share the danger as well as the drudgery of our everyday lives. He desires to weep with us and to wipe away our tears. And what seems most bizarre, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, longs to share in and to be the source of the laughter and the joy we all too rarely know."
- Michael Card

HT: Grace (thanks again for your lovely email)

The Friday Clive

"Something really new did happen at Bethlehem:  not an interpretation but an event.  God became Man.  On the other hand there must be a sense in which God, being outside time, is changeless and nothing ever "happens" to Him.  I think I should reply that the event at Bethlehem was a novelty, a change to the maximum extent to which any event is a novelty or change: but that all time and all events in it, if we cd. see them all at once and fully understand them, are a definition or diagram of what God eternally is.  But that is quite different from saying that the incarnation was simply an interpretation, or a change in our knowledge.  When Pythagoras discovered that the square on the hypotenuse was equal to the sum of the squares on the other sides he was discovering what had been just as true the day before though no one knew it.  But in 50 B.C. the proposition "God is Man" wd. not have been true in the same sense in wh. it was true in 10 AD. because tho the union of God and Man in Christ is a timeless fact, in 50 B.C. we hadn't yet gt to that bit of time which defines it."
 

Morning musings

The view from where I sit is sparkling with sunshine and clear skies.  The bare tree branches outside are a stark silhouette, and the moss of the lower branches glimmers like Hobbiton in the morning light.  I can feel the chill of the day seeping through the old window frames in this lumbering house my daughter calls her home during the school year. It is good to be here.








She is packing, and soon she and I will join all those who have left town for Christmas holidays.  Driving alone yesterday, with only Jan Karon's new novel to keep me company (and a welcome phone call...thank you, Carol), I was eager to just get here, for time to move faster than possible.  Now I am ready for time to slow, stop if it cared to.  I am so glad to be together.

The dirt on the windows makes for lousy pictures, the age of the glass causes the clarity to wobble, too. But I love being on this bed, looking out at these trees, seeing the sunshine sparkling in the Eugene sky, and having Madelaine bustling away around me.











Yes, if time could stop. Just for a bit.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born on this day in 1775, and I am so glad she was.  Happy Birthday, dear Jane!

"Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery."

"There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart."

"There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort."

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away [...]
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

~ T.S. Eliot, No. 2 of the Four Quartets


HT: Dear Juliet.

The ministry of tears

When my sister died in 1993, I had three children, ages three, almost two, and a wee little three month old baby.  They were each so little and all so in need of a functional mother.  At one point in the days after Liz's death, a friend of mine shared a concern:  "I don't think you are crying enough."  At the time, I was hurt by her assessment.  I felt pressured to do this grief thing right, and the idea of being a failure, on top of all the pain of losing my sister, was horrible.

The thing is I was convinced that if I started crying I might never stop, and then what would happen to my dear children?  What if I could not care for them?  And so it is true:  I did not cry enough.

As I look back over the last seventeen years, I realize that what began in 1993 as a way of surviving and caring for my children has become a bad habit, an unhealthy thing.  I have been unable to cry in a cleansing, cry-until-you-are-done sort of way since those dark days of 1993.  That is way too long.




This last week has been very difficult for several reasons.  In my distress, I reached out to a friend of mine, a monk I had met through friends, and he sent this advice to me: 

"Shed tears, lots of them."

As I read those words, something in me cracked, broke, and opened wide.  Tears are flowing, and it is a very good thing.

The ministry of tears, my own tears, is a gift I didn't know to ask for.  It was a freedom that had so long been denied that I could not offer it to myself, but it was a great gift to be given permission to simply cry.  Now in sorrow and in worry I can feel the balm of the Holy Spirit washing over me, healing me, bringing me hope in the midst.  It is so good to be crying again.

In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears.  

Psalm 18:6

What do blue bottles have to do with tears?  See my post here.

This circle of breath...

 




 


SEVEN DEER WHILE THE SUN IS SETTING

There is nothing in the world so still
as those deer, half hidden in the grass,
their legs bent like old cornstalks
beneath them on the hill.

They are undisturbed by the weather,
its daylong withholding of light,
the sky that fell and fell across the hills --
the wind its only tether.

In wet grass, in this beginning light,
in the echo of the door I shut too hard
they are motionless and tame.
It does not matter to them that you are not here tonight.

They stare straight toward the western oceans,
this family, this circle of breath, and nothing,
nothing alarms them, not the fierce gold emergence of an
angel, as the long blue horizon opens.

Copyright Ginny Eliason, 1985.  Used by permission.  






 Also by my dear friend Ginny:

 
Letters from Heaven: An Illuminated Alphabet

The Third Sunday in Advent

"Yet when we embrace the Incarnation, we embrace the love of God. For this is God Himself, God in the flesh, Immanuel, who came to this place out of His great, abiding love for mankind. Not just a good man, not an angel, not even God wrapped in a fleshly outer shell, effectively still separated from man. This is the God-man, Christ Jesus, come to pour out the love of the Trinity, the other-abiding love that was and is and ever shall be, on His most treasured creation, though we were lost, though we would set ourselves to humiliating Him.

To understand Christ as the King self-humbled, the God crossed over from His Kingdom, is to begin to glimpse the great love that we cannot yet fathom. And to meditate on this is to feel one’s heart overflow. “The dogma,” as Sayers would say, “is the drama."

From Tony Woodlief's recent World Magazine online post.  You can read the whole thing here.   Woodlief is the author of Somewhere More Holy (I mentioned it here), and he blogs at Sand in the Gears.

The Rex Man

I love watching Rex play basketball.

 

He jumps high.  He plays hard.  He is terrific.

Two games = Two wins

Love you, #14!!

The Friday Clive

"The Incarnation...illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die, and which at one stroke covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected."

Late autumn's stark beauty

~Photography courtesy of Claire Wheeler~

The difference it makes

The Incarnation.
Advent.
Christmas.

Sometimes I can miss the point.

But then life gets messy and frightening and I realize:

The Incarnation is my rock.

The REALITY that the Son of God was born and lived and died and rose again is IT.

This is not a seasonal celebration; it is my very life and breath and meaning.

More than ever I can relate to Peter.  When Jesus was asking if the disciples, too, would leave after being confronted with the stumbling block that is the body and blood of Christ, he answered:

Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have words of eternal life.  And we have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God.  John 6:68-69

It turns out that Advent is a matter of life and death, my life and death.

Mr. 49

My favorite man in the world has now been alive for forty-nine years!

We celebrated yesterday, since working for a living gets in the way of celebrating on a Monday.
Dutch babies - YUMOLA!

And then we took a trip to our favorite winery with dear friends.  

Good wine, good conversation, great friends.  And the rain waited to really pour until we got home!

  

Happy birthday, sweetheart.