Rachel Spangler's Blog, page 15

26 Songs of Christmas – Joy To The World

Today is a happy one. Yes I am still on a writing deadline. No I have not finished my shopping. No we haven’t gotten our first snow yet. Yes I am completely sober.  There’s still plenty to worry about and I will.  It’s my nature to work and fight and obsess, but I am working harder to also be someone who reflects, and praises, and gives thanks.

So I am making a conscious effort to say I am thankful to have my family safe and healthy and together. I am thankful for a great yoga class.  I am thankful for food in my fridge.  I am thankful for friends who bring cookies.  I am thankful there’s only two days left until Star Wars come out.  I am thankful to have a new book out with awesome friends and authors like Melissa Brayden and Karis Walsh.

Sure there are still things to fear.  There are still things to weep over.  There are forces and ideologies we must fight.  And I will, but I believe refusing to surrender to darkness is part of that fight.

Today I choose joy.

Joy to the world.

25 Songs of Christmas – Almost There

Well I did it again.  I let another day go by without blogging your Christmas song.  I think this is the first year that has ever happened twice.  I’m not really sure what it means. The first time it happened was because of sadness and being overwhelmed. Yesterday day’s blog also got lost in a hectic schedule, but at least this time I had much better reason.

Susie came home!

The first part of the day was spent preparing for her arrival, the second part was largely spent going to get her and settling back in.  Then once we got settled I simply wanted to enjoy the rest of the time left with my wife and son.  I didn’t cook.  I didn’t clean.  I didn’t blog.  We ordered take out, got caught up on what happened while we were apart, and then read our favorite Christmas stories to each other.

For the first time in weeks it started to feel like Christmas time.

As I lay awake next to Suz last night I took time to thank God for the blessings amid the chaos. I think it’s important to find reasons to give thanks no matter what, but I admit it was easier to do with my family back together. We’ve still got challenges ahead.  Chores, shopping, packing, traveling, and yet after the week we’ve had everything seemed more manageable by comparison.

I kept remembering this song and thinking, Yes we are almost there.  “Where death will die and life begins, the answered prayer, Emmanuel.”

We’re almost there.

25 Songs of Christmas

Sorry I didn’t post a blog yesterday.  It kind of got lost in the shuffle. And by shuffle I mean the massive amount of things we had to do.

Susie’s grandma passed away last week.  She was 101 and lived a long impressive life.   Her passing was not unexpected, but it was still sad.  And it happened during end of the year/holiday/final exam time which made it impossible for all of us to travel to Illinois for the service, so Susie went alone.  We don’t generally travel alone so that in itself was a pretty big deal for us.

Add to the mix that Jackson had a holiday concert at school and I had a holiday open house/Pampered Chef party.  The actual party itself was pretty wonderful, but everything leading up to it just felt hurried and stressful and sad.  I didn’t feel very holidayish, but I did find myself praying a lot.

I prayed to make it home from the airport safely. I prayed for safe travels for Susie. I prayed Jackson wouldn’t be too sad his mom couldn’t come to his big concert. I prayed friends would come to the party and keep us company so we wouldn’t fixate on Susie’s absence. I prayed not to burn the meatballs.

Like I said, not very Christmassy, and yet effective. In my moments of sadness and fear and frustration over what my holiday wasn’t turning out to be, I managed to turn exactly where I should. I looked (and sometimes begged) for Emmanuel.

And I found Him.  God with me in the voices of children singing.  God with me in the laughter of friends who showed up to celebrate with us under less than perfect circumstances.  God with me in the hands of family who stayed long after the party to help clean and make sure Jackson and I got home okay.  God with me in both the mundane and the unexpected.

I am sure there are people having better Holiday seasons than I, and I so many people going through so much worse. And yet I believe what ties us all together is that God came for all of us, and God is still available to all of us.

So, with those thoughts in mind, here’s two songs, one for Yesterday and one for today.

25 Songs of Christmas – Come All Yes Faithful

We are working on end-of-the​-​year stuff at church.  The youth are directing our Sunday school Nativity play this year.  They are doing such a great job that I’m mostly just taking notes and offering suggestions.  I assume I will also help corral the younger kids the day of the play.  It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s a good one.  One I’m happy to do.

I am also the clerk of session.  For those of you who aren’t Presbyterian, don’t let the fancy title fool you.  I basically take notes and occasionally make suggestions.  This is also not a glamorous job, but once again I’m happy to do it.

Last night we had our end-​of-​the​-​year meeting.  It was a potluck.  I am spread a little thin,​so I ordered some chicken lo mien​, put it​ in a nice bowl and took it to church.  My fellow officers each brought their offerings that ranged from the store bought to the homemade.  All of it was delicious. Jackson joined us because Susie had a meeting, then her meeting got canceled,​ so she just came and joined us, too.  My immediate family sat around a big table with some of our church family.  We’d all brought what we could, we all appreciated what we had.  We laughed and talked and shared stories.  Then we all cleaned up together and carried on with meetings about budgets and charitable giving and general governance of the church.

Nothing extraordinary I suppose, but as I left I kept thinking about our Christmas play, the ones are youth are arranging.  They are going to open by having the whole congregation sing “O ​Come All Ye Faithful.”  We talked about it as a gathering song.  A call to all people of faith to gather together, to worship together, to behold God in our midst together.

I’m not sure many of us realized that’s what we were doing last night.  I doubt I will recognize the act of seeking Emmanuel as I herd elementary and preschool kids on stage. Those little non-glamorous and often thankless jobs rarely seem like acts of faith while we’re doing them.  And yet it’s often in the looking back, the reflecting after the fact, we recognize the presence of God with us.

“When two or more are gathered in my name, there I am among them.”

“Yea Lord we greet thee.” It comes back to Emmanuel, God with us. God with us in the mundane. God with ​u​s in the little jobs. God with us in the moments when we gather together, to work toward a shared​ mission, no matter how great or how small.

So “Come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.” Where might you meet God today?

25 Songs of Christmas – Take Walk Through Bethlehem

A couple days ago I mentioned having heard “Peace on Earth” a lot this season,​ and today’s song is edging into the same category.  It’s a much lesser known song from Trisha Yearwood called “Take a Walk through Bethlehem.” I’ve heard it a few days in a row now.

Still no pressing blog topic has jumped out at me.  I think sometimes Emmanuel, God with us, works that way.  We don’t get slapped upside the head with a thunderbolt answer.  We get a still, small voice.  It’s a little whisper you have to stop and listen to, and then listen, and listen some more.  And maybe even then we have a lot of things to work through along the way.

Who knows, maybe I won’t ever figure out the message at all.  Maybe the message wasn’t for me.  Maybe it’s for you. Maybe my message was just to share the message with you. Maybe I’ll never know anything other than that I was meant to look, or to listen.

Or maybe it’s like the song says, “There’s a star that still outshines the night​.​  Y​ou can find it if you close your eyes to see the light.”

25 Songs of Christmas (or Hanukkah) – Double play

 

People of my generation all remember when Adam Sandler released ​”​The Hanukkah Song. “​ It was huge!  Suddenly this holiday that only had the dreidel song for little kids had this awesome fun, pop culture touchstone.  It put Hanukkah on the map for cool kids in the ‘​90’s.  Suddenly I realized several of my friends from middle school were either Jewish or came from religiously​ diverse backgrounds.  It made me wonder why that had never come up before.  I mean,​ I was 12 and all I’d gotten in school was some little worksheets and a few vague paragraphs about candles.  And this was Tampa Bay,​ Florida.​ ​I​t’s not like we didn’t have a Jewish population. Why had they been made to sing years worth of Santa songs and I learned my f​irst Hannukah song (A song about how many people were Jewish) from a Saturday Night Live s​kit?

It seems funny to say now, but it was kind of a radicalizing moment for me. All those names, all that fun, this entire epic holiday I knew virtually nothing about. How had I missed that? And more​ importantly,​ why had my Jewish friends and neighbors never had their experiences validated by our shared culture?  It made me wonder all sorts of things for the first time, like if we shared so much else about our likes (schools, friends, sports, hobbies),​ why couldn’t we share cultural experiences, too? Or why haven’t we hadn’t we talk about these things​ before?  Why had I assumed all my friends were Christian? What did we have to gain by drawing those dividing lines? Most importantly,​ though,​ it made me wonder what else I’d been missing.

Make no mistake, ​ I had been missing out,​ too.  My Jewish friends had missed out on hearing their songs and stories in communal spaces, but I had missed out on even knowing them at all. My life, my experiences, my faithful understating suffered due to the full richness of this magical season being either ignorantly omitted or willfully withheld. We all suffer in that scenario because we miss out on the unifying threads that can bind us together across differences.

I’m trying to do better for myself and for my family.  For the last six​ or seven years,​ we have shared our holiday traditions with our Jewish friends. They decorate our Christmas tree with us;​ we light the menorah with them.  They hunt for Easter eggs with us, we celebrate ​P​assover with them.

When you open yourself up to those sorts of encounters,​ it’s impossible not to realize we have more in common that we have diving us. It doesn’t matter if we celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, or Solstice,​ we people of faith are all searching for light in a world that too often glorifies darkness.  The light of a ​star, the li​ghts​ of a menorah, the lights that guides us out of ​our exile, the light returning minute by minute, we are bound together by light and love.

So today you get two songs.

The first is the song that shone a light into my cultural darkness.

The second is my favorite of the many fun Hanukkah songs that I’ve learned since then.

 

25 Songs of Christmas – Peace on Earth

I have heard today’s song a lot this year. I’m not sure why. Do you ever have that happen where you just seem to hear more random song more than all the others? And this one isn’t obscure, but’s no Santa Claus is coming to town or Jingle Bell Rock.  To hear it multiple times a day or several days in a row is quite a coincidence.

Only I don’t believe in coincidence. Not really.

So when I woke up singing the same line of this one over and over I took notice. The line is, “I pray my wish will come true, for my child and your child, too.”

What a thought.  Brings new urgency to “Do unto others.”  I want the same thing for every child than I want to mine.  Think about what that really means.  Do you have children?  Do you have Godchildren, nieces and nephews?  Kid’s you watched grow up?  What to hope for them?  What do you do for them on a regular basis?  What would you do for them if they were in danger?

Now imagine that kid is poor and won’t get any presents this year.  Imagine they haven’t eaten a real meal for days or even weeks.  Imagine they are a refugee.  Imagine they are black and being racial profiles.  Or muslim and being called a terrorist.  What if were trans? Or sick without insurance.

“Every child must be made aware, every child must be made to care, care enough for his fellow man to give all the love that he can.”

This Christmas, what can you do to help children in your life and children the world over bring about the “day of glory when men of good will live in peace again?”

25 Songs of Christmas – O Christmas Tree

Today’s song blog comes late in the day and sans much commentary because we spent a good part of today searching for, cutting down, and decorating the Christmas tree.  So, it only makes sense to choose this song. That, and it’s a song with good memories for me because not only do I remember hearing my grandma sing it as as child, she also sang it completely in German, which somehow made it seem more magical.

This version isn’t all in German, but it’s still nice.

25 Songs of Christmas – Grownup Christmas List

Today we are going to Empty Bowls and our local alternative Christmas market.  These are two of our family’s favorite holiday traditions.  Empty Bowls is an event to support our local food pantry.  Local potters have made almost 2,000 bowls throughout the year, and they will sell them this morning to benefit the local food pantry.  We go look at all the amazing bowls, and we each pick our favorite to buy.  Then we go through the line, and local volunteers fill them with soup.  We sit down and eat with other members of the community.  All the proceeds go to fighting hunger in our area.

The alternative Christmas market is an event at our church where we offer people items made by craftspeople around the world who are paid a living wage for their art. We also have ways to give things like chickens or goats to villages in impoverished areas around the globe through the Heifer Project. Also, we do gift baskets with fair-trade agricultural products including coffee and chocolates.  It’s a great way to find gifts that give back instead of always contributing to cut-throat consumerism.  The church also has a nativity display with over 600 different nativities on loan from community members.  It’s cool to see different representations of the Holy Family from different cultures.

Both events are fun and fulfilling, and I like to think our part in them does a little bit to make the world a little better this holiday season. It’s not revolutionary, but it is an act of faith.  Which made me think of this:

And this:

25 Songs of Christmas – All I want For Christmas

The last few blogs have been extremely reflective, and clearly I think that kind of reflection is an essential part of a meaningful holiday, but sometimes we have to take time to just get in touch with joy too.  If we get so focused on everything wrong with the world we can lose sight of why we even care about saving it in the first place.

I have a lot to be thankful for. I have a healthy wife and son. We have a nice little home. I have a job that I absolutely love. I have a new book (shameless plug) that I’m very proud of. I have the freedom to celebrate and worship how I choose.

I believe we have a long way to go as a society and I believe we each carry a great deal of responsibility to ensure “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  But, I also believe that sometimes choosing Joy is a defiant act.

I picked today’s song because in a world that trivializes the human heart, love still matters.  Go ahead and dance.