Taryn R. Hutchison's Blog: The Glorious Muddle, page 25

When life brings too much to bear

I’ve been in a daze. Stricken to the core. I haven’t been able to think of anything except my friends and former teammates in Eastern Europe. They lost their teenage son last week. These dear ones are not strangers to difficulties. They’ve had to carry burden upon burden, for years now. All of it pales […]

Some Words are Just Better

Westerners who dared to travel to Sochi for the Olympics have been tweeting about the problems they’ve encountered in their hotel rooms. Things like rusty water; things which every Russian has to deal with every day. To Russians, it’s their life. And it’s not funny. My hackles rose when I read some of the tweets. […]

Cluttered Chaos

I like order. I like to take control of my environment, if at all possible, and wage war on clutter. Clutter weighs me down. It makes me unproductive. Uncreative. I feel agitated. I can’t rest until the clutter in my life is tamed. Nothing is orderly for me today. I’m typing this at my desk […]

Snow and Showers

I love snow days. I’d been longing for one ever since I started my new job, over two years ago. With each extremely remote possibility of snow, I’d get my hopes up. And not even one flake would come. Steve and I moved to North Carolina in December four years ago, quickly welcomed with the scene below and with profuse […]

Two Men Named Martin

This week we celebrated the birthday of a great man, one I remember listening to as a child: Martin Luther King, Jr. My office looks out on a statue of another man, likewise used by God to usher in change and reform. This man lived 400 years earlier: Martin Luther. I have often mistakenly (at [...]

Re-alignment

Over Christmas, we dropped off my car to have its health checked. After all, my ever-reliable car is going on 18 now. I figure car years are pretty much the same as dog years, which means it’s about my age and feeling it, too. The car was inspected and realigned and it had a transfusion of fluids – whatever [...]

A Cold in the Cold

Unless you live in Phoenix or San Diego, you’ve felt the effects of this week’s polar vortex, setting low-temperature records all over most of the States. This arctic blast caused our thermometer to dip down to zero degrees Tuesday morning but, unlike many of you, we have not been socked with snow. Not even a flake. (Actually, we [...]

Starting Fresh

I love new beginnings. I’m one of those rare people who actually enjoy moving, not out of any masochistic love of packing or saying good-bye, but because I like starting over. I like the clean, streamlined feeling of having just purged all the extraneous stuff (such as papers and useless junk) out of my life. [...]

Fifth Candle: Darkness-shattering Light

Jesus Christ is the Light of the World. The final candle, the white one in the center of the Advent Wreath that we light on Christmas Day, represents Light. Christ’s white, piercing light sends the darkness scurrying for cover, like roaches when a light switch is flipped. It displaces the darkness. The people who walk in darkness will [...]

Fourth Candle: Love That Gives

The final purple candle is the Candle of Love. Next Sunday (December 22 this year), the Advent candle we light reminds us that the King of Kings loved us enough to send his only son to earth. We give gifts to each other, not out of obligation or manipulation – not to try to appease our [...]