A Year of Promise

A Year of Promise

by | Dec 31, 2019 | Thoughtful Thursdays

PROMISE.
That was my word for 2019. As I blogged about it way back in the first week of January, I said I’d keep an eye out for how God’s promise would play out in my life this year.
Confession: I really didn’t.
In fact, I didn’t even remember that it was my word of the year. I had to look it up on the blog to remind myself a few weeks ago, and I felt quite the mental slap to realize I had a word so, well, promising and didn’t cling to it.
But as I reviewed the post, the scriptures I’d included in it, the thoughts I’d had at the time…it’s okay that I forgot. In fact, it totally fits with the whole purpose of the word as it was given to me. Because the thing that struck me then and which struck me anew as I read my words from a year ago is this:
It’s when we think God has forgotten His promise to us that He’s fulfilling it.
It’s been a difficult year. I finished up the last books of the 6-due-in-18-months schedule I’d been on, and I was seriously exhausted by the end of it. (Hence why I spent three weeks in November frantically rewriting the last of those books, which certainly told the tale of exhaustion, LOL.) My daughter began high school, which in homeschooling world means a bit more intensity for me in terms of grade-and-record-keeping. And my husband is changing careers, which comes with some stress…okay, a lot of stress.
But with the PROMISE of Joy. Something I need to remember now. And cling to. 
Something I need to examine. I sent my blog post from Jan 1 to my husband a few weeks ago, and he asked, “But what exactly IS the promise God has given us?”
He never promises us smooth sailing. He never promises us career success. He never promises us fame or acclaim or anything the world deems “good.” So what is at the heart of His promise?
I will never leave you or forsake you.
Through you all the nations of the world will be blessed.
Seek first the kingdom of God and the rest will be added.
His presence is, ultimately, our promise. Things will go wrong–but He’ll be there. If we keep our focus on Him, nothing else will matter–and we’ll spread the good news of him to everyone else.
A week before Christmas, my family started reading a book together morning and night called Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (there’s a free app for smart phones too that has the exact same stuff in it!). It takes the traditional prayers of the church, both Catholic and Protestant, and combines them into one volume meant to connect us with other Christians around the world and throughout history; to be approachable to different denominations and backgrounds and help us seek unity with one another through our shared roots. The authors explain in the introduction that these sorts of prayers can be used to hide in…but they can also be used to teach us about the form of prayer and to be a wonderful jumping-off place for our more personal ones. There’s a place in each session where you pause to pray for what’s on your list and praise God for what He’s done.
Each morning prayer ends with this, which I think is a beautiful benediction for us all as we close out a year and prepare for a new one:
May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you : wherever he may send you;
may he guide you through the wilderness : protect you through the storm;
may he bring you home rejoicing: at the wonders he has shown you;
may he bring you home rejoicing : once again into our doors.
We never know where He’ll send us. The wildernesses we may go through. The storms that will come. We don’t know what the new year will bring. But we DO know that He’s there. In the whirlwind and in the whisper. We know that He does the miraculous every day, and that we ought to be looking for it, ought to be filled with wonder at the mystery that is our God. We know that when our eyes remain fixed on him, there is always Joy to be found. Always something to rejoice over.
We know that Christ is the ultimate promise fulfilled. 

How has He shown Himself to you in 2019?

Word of the Week – Figgy Pudding

Word of the Week – Figgy Pudding

by | Dec 30, 2019 | Word of the Week

Special request from Bev today, and an appropriate one for the 6th Day of Christmas. ?
Figgy Pudding. If you’re like me, you’ve really only heard of it in that oft-forgotten verse of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” But what in the world is it?
First, let’s get this out of the way: there are no figs in traditional figgy pudding. Rather, fig was just used to represent any dried fruit, especially plums…which also weren’t in the original dish, LOL. No, that honor went to raisins and currents. These fruits were mixed with meats and grains and spices and made into something like a sausage in the earliest days of the dish in 1300s England (“pudding” originally meant anything boiled or, later, steamed in some sort of bag or casing). Over the next two hundred years, fruit became more plentiful, and the dish went from savory to sweet. It became a traditional Christmas dish–often called “Christmas pudding” as a matter of fact…which led to it being outlawed by the Puritans, who didn’t celebrate Christmas.
So why do carolers demand it? Well, back in ye olden days, the poor would sing Christmas songs at the homes of the wealthy with the expectation that they’d get something in response, either a treat or a monetary tip–it was a way to ask for alms that didn’t wound anyone’s pride. The “now bring us some figgy pudding” and “we won’t go until we get some” lines of the song are considered to be a bit of poking fun at this arrangement.
Most Christmas puddings today are baked in loaf pans, laced with alcohol to bring out the flavors, and are filled with fruits and spices.
What’s your favorite traditional Christmas dish?

The Light Has Come

The Light Has Come

by | Dec 24, 2019 | Thoughtful Thursdays

Last weekend, my dad’s Christmas sermon began not with the familiar passage from Luke, but with John.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.




We all know those verses–I can even recite part of it in Ancient Greek. 😉 But this year, what struck me wasn’t the Word…but the Light.



The Light has come. Into this dark world. Into the shadows. Into the gloom. Into the evil. The Light has come–a pinprick, at the start. A baby. Small, vulnerable, powerless. But the moment the God of the universe took on flesh, something shifted in the very fabric of the cosmos.



The darkness was pierced. The Light shone. And the darkness did not–could not–shall not–comprehend it.


Sometimes our world seems so very dark today. Sometimes it feels hopeless. But it’s not, my friends. It’s not, because the Light has already come. And more, the Light now resides in us.


When Christ was born, God set a new star in the heavens, to light the way to Him. May we be that star today–shining the way to Him for those who seek Him. May we be mirrors to reflect His light. 


Christmas is, ultimately, this. A celebration of the darkness being defeated. The Light has come into the world. Let us praise Him.




Word of the Week – Elves

Word of the Week – Elves

by | Dec 23, 2019 | Word of the Week

(Originally published in 2015) 

I am sometimes baffled by how things come into our cultural consciousness…and change over the centuries. Cue the elves.

Elf comes from Germanic folklore, with equivalents in Norse and Saxon mythology. The word itself hasn’t changed much since Old English in spelling, sound, etc.

The meaning, however…

Back then, an elf was considered to be a mean-spirited goblin-like creature with quite a bit of power. Descriptions range from creatures who are merely mischievous to “evil incubus.” Since the mid-1500s, it’s been used figuratively for a mischievous person. They were thought to create knots in hair (oooookay) and hiccups.

Over the centuries, they gradually took on new roles in people’s minds. They were occasionally referred to as “house gnomes,” and while they would act with traditional mischief if not treated properly, they were thought to scare off true evil spirits from your house if you treated them properly–people were known to leave out gifts of food and baubles to appease them.

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Scandinavian writers took this ancient tradition and decided it would be fun to apply it to Christmas. Popular writers of the day began crafting stories that assigned elves the new role of being Santa Claus‘s helpers. By this time traditional belief in elves had pretty much fallen away, so people seized this new thought that sort of revived an old belief, but in a nice, cute way. Visual artists joined this new movement and began painting pictures of what we now identify as elves–cute, small, sprite-like creatures who are all goodwill…at least unless a child in naughty, in which case some old mischief might sneak out and cause them to replace goodies in a stocking with switches or lumps of coal.

So there we have it. Elves. ?

Word of the Week – Jolly

Word of the Week – Jolly

by | Dec 16, 2019 | Word of the Week

This one’s another revisit from 2014. ?
And this discovery made me smile. I have to say that most times when I hear the word jolly, I think of Christmas. Jolly old St. Nick, jolly elves, etc.
And apparently, that’s a good thing to think of! Though the word comes most immediately from Old French jolif, meaning “festive, amorous, pretty,” there are also suggestions that it’s a loan-word from Germanic tongues, akin to Old Norse jol…which
is the word for their winter feast, i.e. Yule…which is Christmas! How
fun is that? So it’s totally appropriate to think of Christmas when you
hear the word jolly, because it’s related!
Have a holly, jolly Christmas!

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