Amy Julia Becker's Blog, page 107

AJB Recommends: Holiday Favorites

Last night, William and Marilee and I cuddled in my bed together to watch The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, one of my holiday favorites. It’s only 48 minutes. It is not a super high-quality production—it was a TV special that came out in 1983. But we made popcorn and hot chocolate and got underneath the covers and laughed and cried (well, I was the only one who cried) as the wild, mean, unchurched Herdmans took over the placid, docile, sweet Christmas pageant.

Christmas Movie

This short show—The Best Christmas Pageant Ever—captures something true about Christmas—that Mary and Joseph were more like refugees than like picture-perfect manikins.

That gifts really matter when they come from the heart.

That the story of Christmas can become way too familiar and sometimes we need to remember the intensity and the beauty of it with a little child shouting, “Hey! Unto you a child is born!”

There’s also a new song recently released by Sovereign Grace that gets to this point. It’s called “O Come All Ye Unfaithful.” At first, I wondered if it was a spoof of the traditional Christmas hymn, but it isn’t that at all. It’s a meditation on the fact that Jesus invites us in our broken, weary, faithlessness to come to him. This has been true from the beginning. We should know that all are welcome as soon as shepherds—people who worked in the middle of the night and were maybe a little dirty and rough around the edges—were entrusted with the good news of great joy.

Christmas Music

We’ve also had a chance this season to listen to Christmas music. We listen to everything from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Silent Night to Burl Ives’ “Holly Jolly Christmas.”

But my favorite Christmas album is Josh Garrels’ The Light Came Down. He has a few classics, but most of these songs are meditations on the story of Christmas offered in his mournful, hopeful way. I could listen to “May You Find a Light” and “Shepherd’s Song” all day.

(As a bonus, I also really love Lauren Daigle’s “Light of the World.”)

Those are some of my holiday favorites! What are your favorite Christmas songs and stories?

Continue reading with Amy Julia:

More AJB Recommends
Inviting God Into My Constraints
What Repentance Has to Do With Christmas

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can  subscribe to my Love is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

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What Repentance Has to Do With Christmas

Image by Getty Images

It was only this year that I learned that the four weeks of Advent (the season in the church calendar that leads up to Christmas) have different themes. They come in a particular order: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. How does the repentance of Advent connect to these themes?

I’ve always thought of Advent as a season of preparation, and I’ve paid more attention to the somber aspects of the season. I’ve noted the mournful notes of songs like O Come O Come Emmanuel. I’ve thought about the longing for peace and justice that remains unfulfilled in our world. I’ve thought about “cleaning up” the rooms in my own soul as a way to prepare room for Jesus.

So how does the repentance of Advent connect to the hope, peace, joy, and love?

Repentance—turning away from everything that separates us from God—allows us to experience hope, peace, joy, and love. And that’s the purpose (at least, from the perspective of the church calendar) of this season. Sin separates us from hope, peace, joy, and love—from everything God wants for us. Repentance is the way we overcome that separation. 

We move furniture out of the living room to make space for a Christmas tree. We put away photos in order to make space for the Christmas photos. We clear off the dining room table to prepare for a feast. 

The same is true in our souls. We turn away from the distractions. We let go of the immediate cravings. We reject meanness and selfishness and greed and fear. And we do all these things so that we make room for celebration. 

Repentance invites us to hope, peace, joy, and love.

Continue reading with Amy Julia:

Faith Is Trusting in the End of the Story
I’m Writing a New Book About Healing
Advent, Hope, and Canceled Parties

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can  subscribe to my Love is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

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I’m Booking Zoom Events

I’m booking Zoom events! One day, I’m going to get on an airplane and fly to a school and a church and a conference center and connect with people in person and speak and teach and I can’t wait. Two of those dates—the showing-up-in-person-to-speak dates—are already in the works (Asbury University next fall and The Festival of Faith and Writing in 2022).

Meanwhile, it fills me with excitement and gratitude to look ahead to online teaching and speaking this winter, with school and church communities continuing to read and discuss White Picket Fences.

I’m currently booking Zoom events for the late winter and spring. If you have a school, church, or community group that would benefit from a conversation about privilege, faith, and participating in healing, please reach out. I’d love to be “with” you, even from afar.

To read more about Amy Julia’s speaking engagements and Zoom events, keep reading:

Speaking: Topics, Honorariums, etc
Postponed Speaking Events, Grief, and Gratitude
Writing for Your Life Conference
A Model for Race and Justice Events

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can  subscribe to my Love is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

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The Healing Work of Salvation

How is salvation “healing work”? Early on in Matthew’s Gospel, he writes that the angel told Joseph to name Mary’s son Jesus because he would “save his people from their sins.” (My Bible’s footnote explains that Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua, which means “The Lord saves.” As an aside, does this mean that when Jesus walked on earth, his disciples called him Joshua?)

Recently I’ve been learning about the Greek word (soter) that gets translated “save” in this passage. It’s accurate to translate soter as “save,” but the same word is used elsewhere after people are healed from disease, sickness, and disability. There’s a fluidity in the language between the idea of salvation and healing. There’s an overlap, a correspondence between the concept of spiritual redemption and physical restoration. 

In other words, we could translate that verse in Matthew to say Jesus would “heal his people from their sins.” 

Sin—every thought and action and inaction that separates us from God, from the love of God—sin harms. Yes, we need rescue/salvation from sin. Yes, we need forgiveness for sin. But we also need to be healed from the harm of sin. We need the healing work of salvation.

As we head towards Christmas, I’m thinking about how Jesus saves us from sin. And also about how Jesus heals us from sin. And I am giving thanks for this offer of healing salvation.

Continue reading with Amy Julia:

S3 E20 | When Love Is Our Home, Healing Begins
Forgiveness, Racial Healing, and Justice
I’m Writing a New Book About Healing

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can  subscribe to my Love is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

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AJB Recommends: All the Fascinating Ideas

I have so many fascinating ideas to share for you to consider! I took the whole week of Thanksgiving off. I shut down my laptop and didn’t reply to email and read books for pleasure and went on lovely walks as a family (see picture above!) and runs by myself. Which means I also listened to some terrific podcasts, read some interesting articles, and started some great books. So here is a hodgepodge of recommendations that range from thinking about faith and racism to politics and personal healing: 

PODCASTS:
The Bible Project

My favorite podcast episode was from The Bible Project:

They talk about the fact that Christianity is the most multi-ethnic movement in all of world history, and how that was God’s intention from the start. This is a beautiful vision—from the Bible—of what God’s family looks like. Even though my experience of Christianity is largely monolithic, and even though our day-to-day experience of the church in America is largely divided upon racial lines, this episode gives reason not only to hope for but to work towards a more diverse worshiping community as a gift to the world.

The Ezra Klein Show

Coming in a close second was Alison Gopnik’s conversation with Ezra Klein about parenting and love and the fascinating ideas of what it means to see our kids as seeds growing in a garden rather than raw materials we are forming and shaping into objects we control. 

The Place We Find Ourselves

I also really loved this fascinating series from Adam Young’s podcast The Place We Find Ourselves on How Healing Happens. It’s a three-part series. I listened to the first one twice so I could stop and take notes the second time. And the final points he makes in the third episode about the disruptive, unique nature of the gift that healing is was also really helpful as I think about healing in my own life and in our world. 

ARTICLES:
Utah’s Economic Exceptionalism

This article about why Utah has fared better than almost any other state throughout this pandemic was fascinating. For anyone disheartened by the current political landscape, this article might give you hope that it is possible to have strong individual responsibility alongside government intervention for the common good. 

Your Brain Is Not for Thinking

And this article about “body budgeting” is helpful in paying attention to what our bodies tell us about our physical and emotional needs. Here’s a taste of what she has to say: 

Anxiety does not cause stomach aches; rather, feelings of anxiety and stomach aches are both ways that human brains make sense of physical discomfort. There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body. This is one reason physical actions like taking a deep breath, or getting more sleep, can be surprisingly helpful in addressing problems we traditionally view as psychological.

How Iceman Wim Hof Uncovered the Secrets to Our Health

And finally, in this post of fascinating ideas, this article for Outdoor magazine gives a fascinating description of Wim Hof, a 65-year-old man who promotes spending time in icy water on a daily basis in order to clear and calm all sorts of woes. He has not convinced me to try it! But I am more and more convinced that I need to pay more attention to the connection between my body and my brain, and this article only underlined that point even more.

Continue reading with Amy Julia:

More AJB Recommends
AJB Recommends: Books, Podcasts, and Films About Racism and Privilege

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can  subscribe to my Love is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

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The Power of Saying “I’m Sorry”

Picture by Meghan Morse Photography

Is there power in saying, “I’m sorry”? The nurse at Penny’s school called me to tell me that Penny had a sore throat and a stomach ache and I needed to come get her.* 

What I did not tell the nurse is that Penny also had physics class, and I was pretty sure that what had been a tolerable post-nasal drip situation had become unbearable in light of that news. A few hours later, Penny confirmed my suspicions. 

Still, I needed to provide some proof that she wasn’t sick with Covid in order to return her to school, so we made a doctor’s appointment. I wasn’t exactly kind in the car ride when I explained that this was costing money and time. She nodded. “When we get to the parking lot, I have something to say,” she told me.

Once we arrived, she asked me to face her. She looked me in the eyes, took my hands in hers, and said, “Mom, I’m sorry.”

The tight knot of anger inside my chest melted. Her sincere words were all I needed. 

The Power of “I’m Sorry”

I thought of that moment when I listened to Bryan Stevenson’s conversation with Krista Tippett this week. Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and the author of Just Mercy. He tells the story of when EJI was opening their Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery: 

The local newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, was kind of complaining a little bit. They said, oh, we know you’re gonna talk to The New York Times and The Washington Post and all of these other — but you won’t talk to us. And we showed them their coverage, their media, their coverage of lynchings that took place in this area, early in the twentieth century. And you read it, and it breaks your heart. They were absolutely encouraging this violence. And I said, “If you ask me why don’t I trust you, it’s rooted in my knowledge of this history.”

We started a dialogue, and the editor didn’t know about any of that stuff, but when we confronted him, he says, “You know what? We have to apologize.”

I said, “I think that would be really powerful.” And on the opening [of the museum], they did this massive headline, massive frontpage, a whole edition dedicated to apologizing for their role in contributing to racial terror, lynchings, in this community. And it was really powerful.”

Public Confession

When I heard that story, I stopped what I was doing just to let the weight of it sink in. My throat clenched with tears. It was as if my body viscerally recognized the power of that public confession. 

Civil Rights Tour during our 2019 sabbatical

On one level, it trivializes the power of reckoning with centuries of racism to compare this moment to my daughter apologizing for faking illness. But this trivial moment and this profound moment speak to the power of apology, the power of public confession, of admitting wrongdoing without caveat. 

For Penny, naming her offense out loud made it far more likely that she won’t do it again.

I have to assume the same is true with this newspaper in Montgomery. In publicly naming their past transgressions, they open the way for future redemptive work. 

For us individually, and for us as a society, healing begins with “I’m sorry.”

*Story told with Penny’s permission

Continue reading with Amy Julia:

Civil Rights Tour Itinerary
Continuing the Conversation: Penny and Black Lives Matter
On Political Correctness and Learning the Language of Love

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can  subscribe to my Love is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

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I’m Writing a New Book! Really and Truly!

So I’m really and truly working on a new book after letting it simmer in my brain and heart for the past few years. I don’t have a title yet, but this one is about how the love of God brings both personal and social healing.

So last week’s fun project was scanning through the gospels for every reference to healing and charting out the stories. The most unexpected moment for me came from Mark 6:55-56:

People ran throughout that whole region and carried the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went—into villages, towns, or countryside—they placed the sick in the marketplace. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched it were healed.

There’s so much to say here, but their sense of urgency and hope, that an encounter with Jesus will bring wholeness and healing—what a picture of love.

I’ll keep you updated on the new book!

Continue reading with Amy Julia:

More of my books!
And check out my free e-books!
The Kind of Love I Want to Proclaim

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can  subscribe to my Love is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

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Rest Beside This Weary Road

Socially distanced Christmas caroling at church

When the kids were little, we got in the habit of singing “Christmas church songs” before bed. We no longer sing these songs all year round, but in December, we pull out the hymnal. 

The words of “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” came as a welcome reminder:

All you beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low, who toil along the climbing way, with painful steps and slow, look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing. Oh rest beside this weary road, and hear the angels sing. 

This season invites us to rest in the midst of busyness, the weariness, the crushing load that we so often try to carry alone. We are grateful for the reminder to pause, to wait, and to listen for the angels.

In the Greek, the “heavenly host” is literally translated as the “heavenly army” or “angel army.” But what does this army of angels bring? Peace. 

This army of angels comes to announce words of peace in the midst of the weariness and pain and the frantic pace. To all of us who rest long enough to hear them sing.

Continue reading with Amy Julia:

Advent Reflections: Prepare Him Room e-book
Walk With Me Through Advent
What I Learned When I Tried to Stop Drinking So Much Wine (or, Advent Reflections on Peace and Overcoming Anxiety)

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can subscribe to my  Love is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

The post Rest Beside This Weary Road appeared first on Amy Julia Becker.

AJB Recommends: Gifts for People Who Already Have Everything

For the past three years, I have taken Marilee with me on the annual trip to buy gifts for her eleven cousins. This year, she selected each gift—with confidence—in approximately twenty minutes. So today we moved on to various adults in our family, this time with William’s assistance as well, and I was happy to remember two of our favorite organizations that have really wonderful gift options that support their ministries. If you are looking for meaningful gifts for the people-who-already-have-everything in your lives, check out:

Thistle Farms, which carries a product line called Love Heals. This organization employs women who were victims of sex trafficking and offers a path to healing as they make products that encourage care for our bodies. (We’ve tried these, and they smell lovely and soothe our dry skin, etc. very well.)

Hope Heals, whose products all benefit their summer camp for families with children with disabilities, carries a line of Kintsugi ornaments/bowls as well as candles, shirts, cards, etc. Jay and Katherine Wolf, who founded Hope Heals after Katherine’s life-threatening stroke when she was a young mom, are a living testimony to the ways God can bring light and beauty out of the brokenness within our lives. 

So, if you are looking for gifts this holiday season, call Marilee. Just kidding. You can also go to Thistle Farms and Hope Heals and support meaningful work while bringing a little beauty and comfort to those you love.

Continue reading with Amy Julia:

More AJB Recommends
Advent Reflections: Prepare Him Room
How My Daughter Convinced Me We Can Help {Ep 107}

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can  subscribe to my Love is Stronger Than Fear podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

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Advent, Hope, and Canceled Parties

November 2020

This year the calendar walks us through a season of Advent, hope, and canceled parties. The weird thing about being a practicing Christian in America in December is that the church calendar and the commercial calendar typically don’t align. The church calendar says we should spend the weeks leading up to Christmas Eve in a time of anticipation that holds both mournful longing and expectant hope. The commercial calendar says we should shop, go to parties, put up lights, and ring bells. 

Christian Christmas and American Christmas

I gave up a long time ago on trying to reconcile these two. I decided to toggle back and forth, as it were, between Christian Christmas and American Christmas. But I also always had a sense that American Christmas had the upper hand.

Every year, I pull out our Christmas-themed books, including multiple ones that walk through the season of Advent with stories from Scripture and reminders of why we anticipate the birth of Jesus with such joy and wonder. Every year, I reminded our family of the purpose of the season. And every year, just a few days in, we had lost track of the Advent calendars. We had gone to too many parties. We had succumbed to commercial Christmas again.

Advent and Canceled Parties

But this year, maybe the month of December won’t hold this tension. We won’t have parties to go to. We won’t have school concerts. We won’t have big family gatherings. We will be home as a family every night. 

Honestly? My first thought was that we should watch a different holiday movie every single night. Or bake a different type of cookie. Or start a craft project that would continue throughout the dark nights. And maybe we will hit upon something like that. 

Wait With Hope

But also, maybe this is the year where we actually practice the church’s traditional anticipation of Christmas. Maybe we will take time every night to light candles and read something from our Advent devotional and pray together that the light of the world would indeed bring light into darkness, hope into despair, joy into sorrow, and love into a world beset by fear. And then maybe we will learn how to wait, with hope, for that light to come.

Continue reading with Amy Julia about Advent:

Advent Reflections: Prepare Him Room e-book
Walk With Me Through Advent
What I Learned When I Tried to Stop Drinking So Much Wine (or, Advent Reflections on Peace and Overcoming Anxiety)

If you haven’t already, please  subscribe  to receive regular updates and news. You can also follow me on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter,  and you can subscribe to my  Love is Stronger Than Fear  podcast on your favorite podcast platforms.

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