Seeing The Unseen

I love the Christmas season.   I love it for the magic that it brings to my otherwise messy life.   I love it because it forces me to slow down in a way and focus.   Not because it brings less activity (in fact quite the opposite) but because it focuses my activity and my thoughts in one direction. When we moved to China years ago, we decided that we would need to start a purposeful set of traditions to keep the Christmas spirit alive for our family in a country that doesn’t even celebrate Christmas as a holiday.    Without a candlelight Christmas eve service, or children’s Christmas pageant, or neighborhoods filled with Christmas lights we wanted to be sure that our own celebration of Christmas didn’t’ get lost.   And we also wanted to be sure that our kids understood in a real and deep way what Christmas was all about.   The only parts of Christmas that have translated to this place are the commercial aspects, but we wanted to be sure that wa...

Taking the long look.   Not always something I am good at.   Living not in light of how I feel or what I see, but what I know to be true.   I have been waging this war in my heart recently and in His always timely fashion, God pointed me to look at the lives of several OT women this week as examples of what it really means to live by faith.   Noah’s wife.   Can you even imagine?   Her husband was named as the ONLY righteous man on earth at that time in history……….. I can’t even imagine what that must have looked like.   Then God speaks to him and tell his to build a boat for the pending flood.   Of course no one had ever seen a boat or rain or even knew what a flood was.   And this was not a tiny undertaking, it was massive with super specific instructions, it had to be able to hold the animals of the world, the entire future of living things.   It took him about 120 years to complete.   120 years…….   We have no indicatio...

My birthday has rolled around again (that happens so quickly these days J ).   Sometimes, I’m surprised by my own age, I’ll wake up some mornings and think I’m still in my 20’s only to jolt myself back to reality that more time has passed then I think.   We use our birthdays and anniversaries to mark the passage of time.   They call us to stop and remember what has happened since the last time we passed this way. And whether the memories are good or bad there is something in us that needs to recall, evaluate, and acknowledge what has transpired.   As I pass my milestone this year I am captivated by the words of a very old hymn penned in 1757 by Robert Robinson, “Come Thou Fount”.   “Come thou fount of every blessing tune my heart to sing thy grace.”   Looking back over my year and even farther past that into the years before, I find that my life is covered with evidences of God’s grace.   They are weaved into every portion of my existence and...

It’s been about 2 months since my last post here.   I’ve tried to write a few times by the thoughts in my head just haven’t come together.   My last post was about saying goodbye to people we had come to treasure as best friends and family during our time here.   After the whirlwind of goodbyes and the end of the semester we rushed off to spend the summer stateside visiting other very wonderful family and friends.   It was an idyllic summer spent playing with cousins, taking swim lessons, and eating too much ice-cream (as if there is such a thing J ).   We are blessed during our times back in the states to return to a place we once called our everyday home which in so many ways still is our home.   We stayed in my parent’s home with my sister and her crazy crew living only a few blocks away.   My parents dote on my kids with all their might to make up for the months apart.   Our best friends still live in town so we squeezed in visits with them (...