Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 273
December 31, 2012
When You Don’t Want A New Year but A New You. . . {Camera Giveaway}
How Maggie Pluim knew to ask that question, I’ll never know.
Grace has it’s unending ways.
True, I had told her straight up that I had no intention of showing up for the church’s annual New Year’s Eve party with Marian Brubacher’s caramel popcorn and Viola Gingerich’s raspberry punch and Mr. Vaness’ countless rounds of Dutch Blitz.
“So— you’re just not celebrating New Year’s Eve this year?“
Maggie just straight up asks me and I’ve got the phone cradled like an awkward appendage between my shoulder and ear and I’m putting away the Farmer’s socks.
Maggie’s talking loud over kids on her end banging out “Go Tell it on the Mountain” on a sagging keyboard.
“Yeah.” I ball up matching grey socks with the obligatory Canadian red stripe, stuff them into that organizing shoe box in the Farmer’s top dresser drawer. “I’m not ready for 2013 and moving forward. I want a do-over on 2012.”
I don’t tell her that sometimes it’s not the moving forward that is the hardest — it is to keep moving forward. Just ask Lot’s wife.
“You really wanna a do-over on 2012?” Maggie’s running water, crashing pots in her sink. Her kids are belting it out now — “…. over the hills and evvvverrryywhhhhereeee.”
“Beecauuse? …” Maggie cuts the water quiet.
I sink down on the edge of the bed, pile of holey socks in lap. The snow dusts the grey limbs of the apple trees in the orchard. The dog’s at the edge of the field barking like an incessant lunatic at some imagined shadows in the woods.
“Because…” I finger a threadbare hole in a sock I should have thrown out last year.
“Well…. do I tell you that 2012 was the year I didn’t lose 10 pounds, forgot every morning for. a. year. to exercise, didn’t finish reading the Bible, failed to write what I really wanted, never got the basement backroom gutted, rammed about in the same ruts on rinse and repeat, only read half as many books to the kids as I’d planned, and missed living up to what I’d named this year?”
Regardless of how shiny any life looks like from the outside, the honest and the Lord look on the bare heart.
We all are failures — at least the honest of us are.
That dog could be barking at a lot more than imagined shadows out there.
How in the world do you step hopeful into the next year when you tripped messy through the last year? How do you stand brave with all the smiling rest and ring in the new year when the old year still feels a bit like a millstone around the neck? What if everyone else is making New Year’s resolutions and you just want New You solutions?
“Remember Hope-girl’s piano piece at the Festival in the fall?” I’m saying it quiet now, more to me than to Maggie.
I can tell her this when I can’t bare my telling heart.
Our Hope-girl had sat in the front row like on death row, waiting for the piano adjudicator to call her name.
Beside her sat this wisp of a Mennonite girl in a long skirt and longer braids who had played her piece like a cheery lark. The girl smiled, swinging her sneakers back and forth blithely.
Hope wrung her hands.
Wrung her hands like a prayer that couldn’t find words. Wrung her hands like hope can be wrung out of nothing. She had said it just before we walked in here, as she’d slung open the van door with her music books, “Last chance to break my ankle and get rushed to the hospital and not. have. to. do. this.”
It doesn’t take much of a leap or rocket science to see how she’s my daughter.
In the adjudicating stillness after the Mennonite protege’s piece, and before Hope’s name was called, you could see Hope, sitting there in the front row, waiting there in her cowl-neck sweater, that patch of bare skin there below her neck, pounding — pounding like one caged, frantic sparrow — and there was no wringing that could set it free.
I sat there and watched it, a helpless witnessing, and I’d never seen terror so tangible — her bare, terrified heart pounding right out of her bare chest, and you could see it, throbbing and moving, fear pounding its wings right there in her, and I tried to catch her eye, to somehow cup her face sure with my eyes, but she couldn’t see me for the drumming of her heart in her ears.
When her name was called, she went to the piano bench.
She pushed it back to make room for the full length of her. Her whole pounding heart filled the whole soundless space.
Her music was with the adjudicator. She must play the whole piece from memory.
She waits at the keys, not moving, waiting for her heart to calm, to hush. I close my eyes tight. Mothers know how to pray for the moving of mountains.
Hope waits. It always does. But when the silence is so expansive it’s awkward and her fear hasn’t shrunk small, Hope does what she has to and she reaches out her hand for the piano and finds that first note. I can see — her fingers shaking.
The first few bars come from memory. Then steady, into the refrain. Then a stumble. Then a finding and high notes, trembling. Can she remember what comes next? I look up to the ceiling. And then — a faltering, off-tuned and wincing. A silence. I can’t look down, only up, up, whence does our help come from.
Hope tries one note. No. Not that one. Quiet. Hanging. Heavy. Then this note? Haltingly, maybe.
Then the next string of notes, a few more, a high chord.
She finds her way again into the familiar refrain and I look down to see her close over keys, her body in the music, her shoulders and arms and back all feeling the song. She is carrying the song and the song is carrying her and we are being carried forward, slow and certain and faster and surer, and then the finish, the flourish. And she sits. Sometimes you can hardly trust your legs, trust turning and taking the next step.
“It was what the adjudicator said to Hope at the end.”
I can hear Maggie draining the sink.There’s a blue jay at the far end of the orchard. The dog’s still barking all pained…
At the end, the adjudicator had stood there with all of their marks in hand and she’d smiled at Hope and asked it gentle, “Do you know what you did so perfectly right, Hope?”
Right? Hope looks down at the floor, shakes her head. Hope’s whole body is saying it: Right? What about any of this was perfectly right?
The adjudicator bends a bit to find Hope’s eyes, tries to pull her up with her smile.
“So you forgot some notes! Fear and old habits and people pressure and your own interior playlist can do that — to all of us. But! When the piece started to fall apart? You fell forward, Hope. You didn’t fret about the music behind you — you focused on the next bar.”
Hope had nodded slowly, like a dawning, smiling.
The adjudicator looked down the row of girls and budding pianists and said it with this steady beat.
“We are all going to botch it somedays. We all sometimes get the notes wrong. But the song only goes wrong when we keep thinking back to the wrong notes.”
“When a piece starts to fall apart — fall forward. Fall forward into the next bar. Moving forward is what makes music.“
And I sit there at the end of the year, on the end of the bed before the sock drawer with a lapful of holey, mismatched socks, and I can hear it, these notes that I might wear like a habit —
Failing? What feels likes losing is really gaining experience. Forward!
Falling apart? Fall into whatever. comes. next. Forward!
Fearful? Fear is always the first step of faith. Forward!
Whenever you are lost, forward is always the way Home.
And in a fallen world, I fall forward into a New Year, and I fall forward into Christ’s safe arms and it is safe to trust. He is safe to trust.
“Exactly.” Maggie’s still there on the other end of the line. “Moving forward is what makes music. And that list that you’re running around in your head? Of all that you got messed up and wrong in 2012? That’s the wrong list to be playing, Ann. Because I read this game-changer of a book all about joy right where you are 
….” I can hear the tease in Maggie’s voice.
“And the real list that you need on replay is that gratitude list — that list of all His gifts in 2012. Playing the list of God’s gifts is what makes music….” Maggie’s on a roll. “And the truth is: Your 2013 doesn’t need to-do lists like it needs to-God-be-the-glory lists!“
The dog stops barking at shadows in the woods.
I can hear her girls in the background, “GOOOOO teelll it on the Mountain!“
And Maggie hollers happy: “Forward!”
And with Maggie Pluim, I laugh yes to all this unending grace and leave it there on the dresser, the new devotional journal
pressed open to the new page —
the pen laying out for Day 1 and #1…
::
::
“But one thing I do:
forgetting what lies behind
and straining forward to what lies ahead…
I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
::
To Celebrate Joy Dare 2012 and 2013: Giveaways
I only do a little something like this once a year, but wouldn’t sharing a bit of joy be a good way to look FORWARD to a New Year?
So let’s crank open the rusty comment box and cheer each other on — FORWARD!
Remember this? And how we began the beginning of this year? so… did you take the Joy Dare and count your own 1000 gifts in 2012?
If you counted 1000 Gifts in 2012 — {we made it!} — we’d like to enter you for a draw of the same model of camera that’s sitting here on our counter — a Nikon D90 {& 18-105 mm f/3.5-5.6G Zoom Lens included.
}
{To enter, thanks for all 1000 gifts must be counted in 2012. But don’t worry if you didn’t get to 1000 — we’re going to do it again in 2013 and share the joy of another camera by December 2013. Forward!)
To Enter for 2012′s camera:
1. Post a photo of you holding up your entries of 1000 Gifts over in the Facebook Gratitude community (it could be a photo of you with entries from your 1000 Gifts Journal, a screenshot of your blog, or you holding up your mobile device with the 1000th entry from the free 1000 gifts app? Just any photo of you (or screenshot) with the way you recorded your 1000 gifts)
2. After you’ve shared the joy of counting 1000 gifts and the dare to really live on the Facebook p….
come back and leave a comment here with the HEADING CAMERA … and what the Joy Dare has meant for you…
Entries for 2012′s Nikon D90 {& 18-105 mm f/3.5-5.6G Zoom Lens will remain open until January 3rd, 8am EST – and then this post will be updated with the recipient…
Annnnnd… to enter for 2013′s Nikon D90 Camera!
Just count your own 1000 gifts in 2013 … How?
Blog your 1000 gifts, or tag #1000 gifts on Instagram, or join us on Mondays and link up to the list on your blog, or record a legacy of your 1000 gifts in the new numbered journal
What do You Get when you Count 1000 Gifts?
Write 1000 gifts and keep a gratitude list and the research proves this is what you really get:
1. a relative absence of stress and depression. (Woods et al., 2008)
2. progress towards important personal goals (Emmons and McCullough, 2003)
3. higher levels of determination and energy (Emmons and McCullough, 2003)
4. closer relationships and desire to build stronger relationships (Algoe and Haidt, 2009)
5. Increased happiness…. by 25% — (Who wouldn’t want 25% more happiness!) (McCullough et al., 2002)
Who doesn’t want all that? Begin counting — just 3 gifts a day — FORWARD!
And a Little Giveaway today to launch #1000gifts 2013?
To enter today to win:
a signed copy of One Thousand Gifts,
a signed copy of the new One Thousand Gifts devotional & numbered journal to record 1000 gifts in 2013
a turquoise nest pendant with necklace
and your own journal
just wave in the comments box today with one thing you are thankful for (yes, the comment box! Open!) –
Reading via email or in a reader: click here to join the encouraging gathering in the comment box and leave your entry to the giveaway…
For another entry (or two):
Share that you’re doing The Joy Dare {Count #1000Gifts in 2013} on facebook or on Twitter:
Dare you: Count #1000gifts in 2013. Who doesn’t take a dare to Joy? {the free camera would be bonus} http://bit.ly/Rr50vw #JoyDare … and then leave another comment here for each share?
Entries for the Books/giveaway package will remain open until January 3rd, 8 AM EST.
Taking the dare to FULLY live with you! FORWARD!
{Join the Joy Celebration in the Comments}
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
December 30, 2012
Links for 2012-12-29 [del.icio.us]
... Oh. my. Have you seen this this Mama of all Year End lists? :)
Best lipstick, best song, best book, best trip, best God-story - you amazing folks have made this "Best of Everything 2012" list dance with over 1,200 wondrous "bests"!
What a way to see all the blessings of 2012 --- and a giveaway of the new One Thousand Gifts Devotional to boot! :) Grab a pen and paper and be crazy inspired by all the wonder here!
December 29, 2012
2012: A Year in Photos {and 7 Links for 2013}
From calendar page to calendar page,
the moments are our lives
and the years are blinks.
{just a few photos from the farm and 2012:}
“Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power:
for thou hast created all things,
and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”
Rev. 4:11
And 7 Great Links for a New Year:
A new plan for the year? Clean and Organized: Beautiful Free Cleaning Calendar for January
A getaway for the new year? a holiday plan? Did you see this? 330+ amazing ideas!
The best books of 2012, the best recipes, the best jeans, the best God-stories: The Best of Everything 2012 …
String it up somewhere, just for a grateful focus, just because! A free printable Happy 2013 Banner
“Because a goal without a plan is just a dream”: Write a 5 year plan
Perfect read to begin the new year? Really embracing the fullest life? The new One Thousand Gifts Devotional Journal as an ebook for just $3.79 and One Thousand Gifts itself as an e-book for just $3.79
Best Habit for the New Year? One year, just 2 verses a week, a free memory Book to memorize the book of Colossians? Or, just 2 verses a week, and a free memory book to Memorize the Sermon on the Mount –
{And Next Week:
1. more on this journey this year of memorizing Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5,6 & 7 and why I don’t want it to end… and 2013′s new Bible memory project…
2. My One Word for 2013 … I name all my years with One Word — Have you christened your 2013 with its name? Join us next week with your One Word name for the New Year
3. Count 1000 gifts in 2012? If you counted a complete 1000 gifts in 2012 — join us next week here to enter the draw for the Nikon D90 DSLR camera… and what the Joy Dare Plan is for 2013!}
Blessed last weekend of 2012, friends… .
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth. Give Thanks. Become the gift.
Related:
2011: A Year in Photos
2010: A Year in Photos
2009: A Year in Photos
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2012-12-28 [del.icio.us]
@ The High Calling.... the overall best posts of 2012 at High Calling... good reads worth checking out
December 28, 2012
Links for 2012-12-27 [del.icio.us]
@ Boston Big Picture... just go slow through these... really slow. The ways of our God? Absolutely breathtaking. Worth sitting together and sharing with someone close...
When a Kid's Bedroom Isn't a Room
"Mollison's work shows that wherever a child lies down at night is not so much a retreat from as a reflection of the world outside." Striking and unforgettable...
December 27, 2012
The Best of 2012 (with a Giveaway….)
You hear it, too? The clock ticking down on this year?
Oh, we’re all lingering in the wonder of these holidays a bit longer, and pulling up a chair just for you, and passing down your cuppa warm.
We’re all over here today with a giveaway … and a list of the Best Books of 2012, the Best Recipes, the Best Music… and so. much. more.
Come chime in at the best little year end party in this neck of the woods?
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
December 26, 2012
Why You Can Have the Most Hope the Day after Christmas
I milked a sow on Christmas night and her white ran warm.
It was after the packages for the neighbors were wrapped up and walked over across the snowy fields.
After the baking and the eating and the gathering and the candles and the singing and the Scripture and the praying.
After the feast for the coming of our Salvation.
After the last of the relatives slipped home in the dark, we wandered out in the snowy dark —
looking up at the stars over a barn.
It quiet in a barn on Christmas night.
The world feels far away. Sows grunt, piglets root and nuzzle udders for milky warm, and snow falls soundlessly out there in the dark.
I fill feed troughs.
I fill the sows’ troughs and this is what they laid him in. Laid God in skin down in a feed trough. These were the first sounds of earth that reverberated in His ear drums? From the lofty, soaring arias of the heavenly host to this? This snorting of beasts, this banging of feed troughs? Us all so hungry.
“What you smiling about?” The Farmer grins at me.
“The smell.” His eyebrows arch. I laugh. “It smells like —- home.” I wink. It is — this scent. This is us, who we all are. And from the incense of the celestial heights to this air hanging thick with dung’s rank — He came to this.
God comes to the edges.
He intimately knows the muck of my lives, the stench I try to mask.
And this is the thing: He chooses my dirty places, the places that shame me, as His point of entry. The lights celebrating the birth of the Christ Child — God with us — they’re still flickering as we look into the New Year — a new us.
Slopping hogs on Christmas night, I feel this happy relief: The New Year only has hope because Christmas happened out in a dung heap.
Last of the sows fed, the Farmer says there’s one more thing.
Just check for milk before we turn out the last of the lights. Check the udders of the next sows due to give birth, see if they have any milk. Make sure if any sows have milk, a sign they are close to giving birth, we get them into the warmth of the birthing rooms.
He finds a sow out in the gestating room dripping white milk.
She’ll need to be moved into the birth barn.
“Check the sows in room 3, the ones that don’t have any litters yet?” He calls it to me from the other end of the barn. “Any of them have milk?”
I find 4 sows that haven’t given birth yet.
I rub their full, ruddy udders. Sweet whiteness sticks between my fingers. I smile back at him from the door. “Only every single one of them have milk.”
The barn’s right full. And on Christmas night there’s one round and heavy with hope and she needs a place to give birth.
“Well.” The Farmer smiles. He pulls at the peak of his farm cap. “I guess we’ll just have to make room for her somewhere?”
We wander through the barn and move a few pigs this way and we move a few pigs that way, a sow over here and a sow there.
We make room at the inn.
It takes an hour or more and it’s late when we’ve made space and she sways heavy into the birthing barn. Something always comes to fill the empty spaces.
We turn out the last of the barn lights on Christmas night. The snow’s heavy in the yard. Our feet make tracks.
“Mama?” Shalom walks beside me, holding my hand. “Will tomorrow be Christmas too?”
I know that feeling. Not wanting any of this wonder to wander away — or me from it.
“Well, I’m thinking… ” I stop, look out across the fields and the white and the stars. “I’m thinking that it’s Christmas now forever.”
Her laughter rings all around us.
“Yes, Mama, yes!” She spins around in snow, in the halo of the barn light, us all under stars.
“It is Christmas forever now — because Christ is always with us.”
We hang our coats outside the mudroom.
And in front of our fire and our tree, the figurine of Mary swollen with hope on that donkey, she’s arrived at her deliverance and they make room for her out in the barn.
We sit with her and Christmas and let the candles linger on.
This milky white light shimmering everywhere, feeding us a forever hope in the dark…
::
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edited archive that I really need the day after Christmas
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
December 25, 2012
At the Christmas door… from our house to yours…
… we open the front door and marvel with you all, the kindest of friends, at the Merry of CHRISTmas, and all this world singing — do you hear what I hear?
In one warped world, the door’s jammed right tight,
and we’re all aching and longing and hoping in this twisted dark,
straining for footsteps from Somewhere Else,
for the jangling of keys and a crack of light,
wild for the hope from the outside that can spring us out —
and if you still
and turn
and listen —
there it is: Christmas —
the creaking of The Door wide open.
“I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved…”
“She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’”
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
December 24, 2012
The Best Christmas Gift & the Miracle We Need
It’s nearly that time of Eve.
And the Farmer, he’s driving down the middle of an empty country road, when he just flicks the headlights right off and the black isn’t black after all.
“Look at it!” I whisper it.
The bowl of milky moon’s spilling over snow sleeping fields.
“You could drive the whole way home without the lights on.”
“That moon sure is bright… “
The Farmer’s leaning over the steering wheel.
The moon reflects the sun, and the Christmas-white fields reflect the moon, and we’re all faces shining tonight, the whole world looking up.
Wise men did this — two thousand years ago, far in the east, magi were like this, craning necks back to touch the black — to read star Braille in the dark.
Wise men, men of the ruling body of the Megistanes, robed sages with absolute power in choosing the king of the eastern empire. The wise men, the king-makers. King-Makers feeling along the stars for a sign.
Isn’t the whole planet looking up on the Eve, looking up for a King?
Night air snaps cold and heaven pushes close.
It feels like you can almost touch them, all these stars.
There are 70 thousand million, million, million stars in the known universe, that’s what they say.
They say that’s 10 times as many stars as the grains of sand on all the world’s shores and deserts.
But there’s no seeing it from these fields —- that 8000 light years into that celestial ocean, the whirl of a stellar wind forms the waving threads of the Hourglass Nebula.
There’s no seeing it with the naked eye, the Sombrero Galaxy’s blinding white, its bulbous centre spinning like an explosive broad-rimmed hat, whipping up a dust ring 28 million light years above these December fields.
There’s no glancing up to a mere 7,000 light years away, to the filmy wings of the 90 trillion kilometers high Eagle Nebula and how it’s bearing right tonight newborn stars in this explosive nursery.
It’s up there on Christmas Eve, whether you can read along the stellar dots raised in the night or not:
“He breathed the word, and all the stars were born” (Ps.33:6 NLT).
Our God breathes stars.
Is that the wisp of His breath rising right there in the Eagle Nebula?
Sitting here beside The Farmer, the swine herder, I’m thinking of sheep herders who saw God breathe a Star of Wonder over a Bethlehem sky.
I’m thinking of the whole bright sky declaring the glory of God, pouring forth speech: “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth, peace among men with whom He is pleased” (Lk. 2:14).
I’m thinking that we’re all on cusp of Christmas, looking up, hearing, seeing, nearly touching the glory of God, and it all begs the whisper of a question: who are we that He is mindful of us?
Who are we that the Maker of man might descend a man, that the Bread of Life might hunger for us, that the Fountain of Living Waters might thirst for our quenching?
Who are we that The Way might make the journey for us, that the Life might lay down and die so we could live?
They say that the Voyageur 1, that spaceship, it snapped the picture of who we are. A picture of who we are from 4 billion miles away, as the spacecraft turned around for one final glance back at its home before it drifted forever out of our solar system.
The photograph initially seemed inconsequential — black, dark…. empty.
But men leaned in, read the sky painstakingly — and there we are.
That is who we are: the entire planet is an infinitesimal 0.12 pixel in the photographed scheme of space.
It almost looks like nothing, this globe with its craning wise men.
Pale Blue dot is Earth, in a shaft of sun light, taken from 4 billion miles away
So we float, captured in a ray of light, suspended in the lonely black of space.
That is who we are on Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Eve, the whole of the world sleeps and rises and waits and worships and we are a pinpoint.
We are a pinpoint and the astronomer Carl Sagan, deeply moved by that photograph of who we are in this universe, he said,
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
~Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan, he looked at that pale blue dot in all that dark…. and that’s what one of our wise men decreed — that there’s “no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
No hint of help?
No sign of saving?
No rumor of relief?
What if our God didn’t bother with a mere “hint”? What if our God rang it across the heavens, broadcast it from the astral apex, shattered the skies with the tidings?
Our God who breathes stars, He breathed Bethlehem’s Star, then took on lungs and breathed in stable air.
Our God who formed and delivered the heavens, He waited patient like an embryo in a womb and delivered Himself to free all humanity.
Our God who cradles whole galaxies in the palm of His hand, whom highest heavens cannot contain, He folds Himself into our skin and He curls His newborn fist in the cradle of a barn feed trough — and we are saved from ourselves.
We are saved from our hopelessness — because God came with infant fists and opened wide His hand to take the nail sharp edge of our sins.
We are saved from our pain — because God pierced the dark and came to the pinpoint of us in the universe and He took the nails.
We are saved from our loneliness — because God is love that can’t stand to leave us by ourselves, to ourselves.
The entire cosmos sings it on Christmas Eve: We are not alone.
We are a pinpoint in the universe that is now nailed to eternity because of the wood of a manger, of a Tree, of a crowning wreath of thorns.
Out of the dark, out of the black and right into the the land of the shadow of death, a great Light has dawned, and God comes and God is with us, Emmanuel… God on the pale blue dot.
We are not alone.
God can’t miss this pale blue dot, and God can’t leave you in your pain, and God can’t and the King comes, God comes — Love come down.
We turn at our sideroad, drive up through the woods, following the way of wise men, always looking up.
The snow’s lying still, bright.
The moon, it hangs an ornament in all these trees that have thrown off their coats in the joy of tonight — the joy of His coming.
And all the world this night, it aches and it hurts and it huddles and it groans and it glows a wonder in a black that isn’t that black after all —
God’s with us on this pale blue dot, God whispering realest Christmas miracle into this dark:
“I am here and you are not alone.“
edited archive
Photo credit 1, 4, 5, 6, 12, 14, star photos NASA, public domain
Related Posts:
Part 1: When You’re Looking for a Christmas Miracle
Part 2: The Christmas Miracle He Will Not Withhold from You
Part 3: When it’s Hard to Believe in Miracles this Christmas
Part 4: What to do with a Broken Heart this Christmas
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
December 22, 2012
An Invitation to Live Wonderstruck
Today, just a few days before Christmas, more than a little thrilled to throw open the farm door and invite in a Jesus-passionate sister, Margaret Feinberg— Margaret guest posts here today and this woman knows story:
‘The announcement of a promotion for my husband, Leif, had required a move.
And we had spent every waking hour boxing up all we owned and saying good-bye to loved ones.
We weren’t moving far: ninety-two miles to be exact.
But in southeast Alaska, where the only way to travel between islands is by air, boat, or long frigid swim, miles multiply in people’s hearts.
Rumors circled of the inefficiency and unreliability of the ferry system connecting the regional ports, but remained the only practical option for the move. We soon feel asleep in our seats.
When I awoke, something compelled me to look up, and a scene unfolded that I suspect caused at least one angel to gasp:
The expanse of the sky transformed from inky blackness into an infinite canvas on which brushstrokes of apricot, sapphire, and emerald painted themselves into the night sky.
Like an oil painting in progress, the colors refused to stand still.
The hues danced as if listening to jazz. Iridescent shades sharpened then faded with wild fervor.
Even though I lived in Alaska for five years and witnessed the northern lights more than a hundred times, none compared to that night. I still savor the encounter and live in hopeful anticipation of another.
Though we now live at a lower latitude on the outskirts of a major city notorious for its light pollution, on many nights, you’ll still find me scouting the sky in hope of catching another glimpse of the wonder.
It occurred to me that this is the posture we’re supposed to take in our spiritual journeys.
God delights for us to cup our hands in prayer and scrunch our faces against the vault of heaven in holy expectation that he will meet us in beautiful, mysterious ways.
The Creator desires to captivate us not just with his handiwork but with himself—displaying facets of His character, igniting us with His fiery love, awakening us to the intensity of His holiness.
Often such incidents occur when we least anticipate, leaving us wonderstruck much like my encounter with the northern lights.
But the insistent invitation of the Spirit is to stay alert! Eyes wide open. Hands pressed against the glass.
We never know when or how God, like the aurora borealis, will appear. But we can live each day trusting that the God who met us in the past will once again greet us with arms wide open in the future.
What are the wonders of God in your own life that you fail to marvel or even sleep straight through? How often do you pass by God’s presence and handiwork unaware?
I double dog dare you to pray for wonder and live expectant for how God may choose to answer….”
is author of Wonderstruck: Awaken to the Nearness of God
book and Bible study (Worthy Publishing/Lifeway Publishing) releasing Christmas Day.
Margaret’s a kind, delightful friend whom I’m utterly grateful for and pray with earnestly and she’s offering some truly gracious bonuses for pre-orders over here.… joy, yes?!
I’m right kneeled with you this Advent weekend, friends –
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth. Give Thanks. Become the gift.
Photo credit #1 and credit #2 and photo credit #3
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
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