Rachel Spangler's Blog, page 9

Christmas Song Blog Day 22 – Almost There

Today we travel.

If all goes well, 11 hours of driving will carry us over roughly 600 miles of middle America to our family home. Despite the modern conveniences, at times it still feels like a journey of Biblical proportions. And when we arrive there will be room at the inn, but not necessarily peace. We will feel relief and joy, but our relationship with our destination, the town and the people who fill it, is complex (see my Darlington Romances for more on this). There will be more stress than usual this year due to the current political climate. And yet there will also be Christmas, with family and love and church filled with golden light. Today’s song blog is a reminder that we are heading toward something worth celebrating, and we are almost there. It will help me keep moving forward amid all the reasons I have not to.

But more than that, it reminds me that beyond this trip, beyond my own life and my own limited view, the angels can still see redemption’s plan still unfolding.

Lonely road, a willing heart, I pray for strength to do my part.

I want so badly to be a part of the solution, of the healing, of the redemption. I am trying to trust the Father to provide bread of heaven, prophesied, but it doesn’t feel like we’re almost there. It feels like there’s so much to be done and miles to go before we sleep.  I feel helpless and frail and afraid of what comes next. I don’t know what that is. I don’t know where we go from there, but Christmas is a reminder that no matter what we are to encounter, we do not have to do it alone. Christmas is the answered prayer, Emmanuel.  The plan is still unfolding. The prayer is still being answered.

Emmanuel. God with us.

God with us, as we travel this holiday and as we travel the long, winding road as a nation, as a world. And in that sense, the sense that Christmas has the power to bring hope and peace and renewed strength to face the journey ahead. We are almost there.

Christmas Song Blog Day 21 – I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day

Today’s song is one of my modern favorites. Not for its joy (It almost always leaves me in tears.), but for its power. It’s based on a Longfellow poem written during the Civil War. His son had joined the Union army against his will and was severely wounded at the Battle for New Hope Church in Virginia.  Longfellow spent that Christmas not knowing if Charles would heal or even live.  He wrote of hearing Christmas bells and feeling disconnected.

And in dispair I bowed my head. “There is no peace on Earth,” I said. For hate is a strong and mocks the song of peace on Earth, goodwill to men.

This poem that was later turned into a song fits for me right now in so many ways. I do not feel the traditional Christmas joy.  I do not identify with the angel’s message of peace on earth, goodwill to men. Our country is more divided than I have ever seen it.  The wounds from the Civil War have been ripped open again, and added to them is a resurgence of hate and bigotry that culminated in the election of man representing all of those horrible ideals to the highest office. The darkness covers us now.

Today is the winter solstice. Light is in short supply, and in its absence the darkness overtakes me. I feel it in my bones. It seeps through my skin and settles over my heart.  Tonight I will sit in the cold silence and pray for this night to end.  It’s a prayer I have become all too familiar with, but I know that others before me have prayed it as well. Throughout our history, we have begged God to return us to the light.

Till ringing, singing on its way, the world revolved from night to day, A voice, a chime, a chant sublime.

The light returned for Longfellow. The light returned to America. The light will return for us, slowly, painfully, incrementally, sixty seconds a day. That’s the way the world works.  It revolves from night to day. One minute of light at a time amid an ocean of darkness.  So small it won’t be detectable at first. But like one candle that lights another, the next day it will double. Then bit-by-bit ,those minutes will become hours. One voice will become a choir.  One protest will become a movement.

Then ring the bells more loud and deep, God is not dead nor does He sleep. The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth goodwill to men.

Christmas Song Blog Day 20 – Sweet Little Jesus Boy

I used to hate today’s song.  It didn’t fit with my understanding of Christmas.  I use to think the manger was cute, with all those animals, and the shepherds, and the idyllic golden light.  When I was a child I thought like a child, and this song is not childish.

Then I became an adult.  I came out.  I studied history and politics.  The Bush administration lasted eight years.  I saw how unfair the world could be. Christmas came to mean something less perfect and more radical. I saw the dirt and fear and oppression.  Then I gave birth myself.  It was scary and bloody and painful, and even with all the comforts of modern medicine, it was still dangerous.  I think that’s when I really understood the horrors of the manger.

And still, I didn’t fully fall in love with this song until recently, because I didn’t see any real plus side in pointing out how awful giving birth in a manger really is until I let it sink in that this wasn’t just any sweet little baby who we made be born in a manger.  This was God.  The savior of the whole human race.  The person born to bear the sins of the world. This was the long-awaited Christ child, and we didn’t know who He was.

Jesus came into the world of circumstances and still showed us how to love God and love neighbor. He taught us that the greatest among us must serve.  He taught us that whatever we do to those least among us we do to God.  He lived his life to show us how to be our best amid the worst the world has to offer. Two thousand years later we are singing prayers that say, “Please forgive us, Lord. We didn’t know it was You.”

That’s not for nothing.  That’s a reminder, every day, no matter what else is going on in our own lives, to look into the depths of human despair, at the grimy, at the dirty, at the bloody, at the foreign and the frightening, and to say, “Is that You, Lord?”

Because the answer to the question is alway “yes.”

Christmas Song Blog Day 19 – Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy

Another dark day.  I fear the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey will serve as another Archduke Franz Ferdinand type of moment on the path to a large-scale war.  I pray that I am wrong, but I’ve studied a lot of history, and if history does, in fact, repeat itself, things don’t look good right now.

That thought has led me to reflect on the idea of peace.  On a global scale. I don’t know what that looks like.  The United States had been at war (or war-like states) for more than half of my lifetime.  I started college less than a month before 9/11.  My classmates were the first to go to Afghanistan and then Iraq. I have never known a time in the 15 years since then that I haven’t had a middle school, high school, or college classmate fighting overseas.

I want better for my son.  I want better for all our sons and daughters. I don’t know how to go about that, though.  I look at Russia and Turkey and ISIS and the US’s dependence on foreign oil, and I don’t see any way to avoid more bloodshed.  The only comfort I have right now is knowing that I am not alone.  I know there are other Americans out there who don’t want to rush to war.  I know there are other parents out there working to raise our sons and daughters to value peace, both global and interpersonally.  Most importantly, I know that I have God who so loved us that He sent down Jesus to be our Prince of Peace. I know that if we set aside everything that tries to hurt or divide us and focus exclusively on Jesus’s message of loving God and loving our neighbor, it is virtually impossible to end up at war.

I don’t really know that that’s a reasonable expectation for the world right now, but I do know that God rarely operates based on reasonable expectations. There is nothing reasonable about Christmas, but here we are, bracing to celebrate it even 2,000 years later.  Maybe this time we’ll get it right for once. Peace on earth for my child, and your child, too.

Stranger things have happened.

 

Christmas Song Blog Day 18 – Who Would Imagine A King?

Today I got to spend the morning working with our Sunday School children.  They had dress rehearsals before church, then did their play for the whole congregation during the time normally reserved for the sermon.

I am sad to report that my camera shut off (card full) halfway through the performance, so I don’t have video (hopefully someone else got some), but the play went off really well.  Aside from some nervous shoving between the sheep and the camel, everyone hit their marks and their lines, and the congregation seemed to enjoy themselves as much as the kids.

What made this play so special was that it was written by our children. We almost didn’t let them do it.  We were crunched for time this year, we only have a handful of kids in Sunday school right now, and the adults were all pretty emotionally spent after the election.  The grown ups all voted for a traditional pageant with an adult narrator.  The kids, however, had other ideas.  They wanted to do it all: write, direct, and star.  Thankfully we have a policy of giving our kids a great deal of leeway in our congregation because they were right. When we wanted to pull back, they pushed us all forward, and that’s exactly what we needed right now.

They ended up writing a short, simple play about how messages from God get twisted around when humans get involved, and how what we want from God is rarely what we get, but what we get is usually what we really need.

They named the play A Different Kind of King, and I am sharing the (rough) script below.

Angel and Star at the front of the church

Angel: God told me there’s going to be a new king on earth. You have to go light the way for Him.

Star: A new king. There have been lots of kings all over the world. What’s so special about one more?

Angel: This is going to be a different kind of king. This king won’t come from men. This king will come from God.   Go get ready.

Star: Okay. Where am I going?

Angel: Bethlehem.

Star: Bethlehem? That is different!

Star wanders up higher on the stage.

Star: A different kind of king? A different kind of king. I like that. Maybe this will be a fancy king. A shiny king. A glittery king. I sure would like that.

Wiseman and Camel come on and stare up at the Star.

Wiseman: Is that new star? It is! What does that mean?

Star: twirls

Wiseman: What can it be? What can it be?

Star: Pssst

Wiseman: What can it be?

Star: Oh come on, it means a new king! A very different kind of king. REALLY different.

Wiseman: I think it might mean a new king. A very different kind of king. Maybe this king will be a smart king. A king that wants to learn. A king that surrounds himself with smart people.

Wiseman starts to walk off, but camel keeps looking at the star.

Wiseman: Come on, Camel. Let’s go look for a king.

Wiseman and Camel wander off, but Herod comes up from behind them.

Herod: A new king? Preposterous.  I am the king.  I am the best king. I do all the best things. No one has more respect for the poor and needy than I do…except what if the people like the new king better than me?  I can’t let that happen.  This new king must be stopped.

Herod exits. Camel and sheep walk up on stage

Camel: Maaaaw

Sheep: Baaaa

Camel: Maaaaw

Sheep: Baaaa

Camel: Maaaaw

Sheep: Baaaa

Camel Exits: Sheep runs over to Shepard, who is looking up at the star.

Shepard: That sure is a pretty star.

Sheep: Baaa.

Shepard: What? A new king? I don’t want any more kings. Kings are mean. Kings don’t care about people like me.

Sheep: Baaa

Shepard: A different kind of king? Maybe I’d go see that.

Kids clear stage.

Choir sings “Who Would Imagine A King.”

Mary and the baby on stage, other characters come in one at at time and take a peek at the baby.

Angel: There He is. Your new king.

Star: That’s it? A baby? Wrapped in swaddling clothes? That’s not fancy. Where’s the glitter?

Wiseman comes in: A baby? Babies aren’t smart! Babies can’t even talk.

Animals come in, sniff baby.  

Sheep: Baaa

Camel: Maaaaw

Shepard: A baby? I don’t understand.

Mary: This is going to be a different kind of king. He will be called Emmanuel, which means God with us. He isn’t the kind of king the world is looking for right now, but he will be the kind of king the world needs. He has come to show us all how to love God and how to love our neighbor, and that is what will make Him the King of Kings.

Christmas Song Blog Day 17 –Joy Medley

Today is a busy day for the Spangler household.  We are cooking and cleaning, and delivering Pampered Chef orders and Christmas cards, then we are off to a tennis tournament in Buffalo.

It’s nothing major, nothing we’ll likely even remember much of a few months from now.  It’s just one of those days where we get to get a little done and have a little fun as a family.  This season I’m working harder to try to recognize that these are good days.  There have been so many bad days in 2016. And by bad I mean terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days. I have found that the awesome, amazing, fantastic, very good days aren’t enough to even the score this year. This year I am learning that I have to find ways to take joy and comfort in the days when nothing major goes wrong. At first it felt like I was lowering the  bar too much, and I wasn’t sure that was helpful in the long run.

Then one Saturday in November during one of those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days I got a little wake-up call.  Jackson started vomiting at about 1 am and continued to do so hourly until 6 am. And then our cat died. Susie had to go to church, so it fell to me to dig a grave. We live in a heavily wooded area with our fair share of digging animals, so I had to get down at least 4 feet in an area filled with big, old tree roots. I finally had to text my neighbor to see if he had an auger I could borrow. He didn’t, but he had a fence post digger and a sharp shovel and a willingness to work. We dug for about half an hour, both of us drenched in sweat by the time we finished. At which point I turned to him and said, “Hey, why aren’t you at church this morning?”

He very casually said, “It’s my birthday. My wife and kids gave me the morning off.”

My stomach sank and clenched at the same time.  He’d just spent his birthday morning off digging a grave for my dead cat. I apologized profusely. He just laughed and said, “It’s okay.”

I kept apologizing.

He finally smiled and said, “Any day you get to spend helping someone is a good day.”

Ever since then I’ve been working as hard as I can to remember that lesson and even expand on it.  Any day I help someone is a good day.  Any day I get to talk to a friend is a good day.  Any day I get to spend with my family being happy and healthy is a good day.

I don’t think I am ever going to look back on 2016 as a good year overall, but as I sat down and went through our photos to make our annual year-in-video, keeping those new lessons in mind, I did find that if I looked hard enough and kept the right mindset, I was able to find a lot of those good, quietly happy moments amid the mess and mayhem.

Here are a few of our good moments, in the hopes that they will help you find a few brights spots of your own in these dark days.

 

Christmas Song Blog Day 16 – Grown up Christmas List

Last night we saw Rogue One.  We are Star Wars people (that is an understatement).  I really needed a Star Wars Movie right now. I wanted to see good triumph over evil.  I wanted to see a scrappy band of rebels beat the empire.  I wanted to believe that we could win.

This move did that, but sort of like the Christmas story, it didn’t do it in the way I’d been dreaming of.  I won’t give any spoilers here other than to say the movie is complex.  It is not easy.  It’s one I will be pondering for a long time to come.  I guess that’s par for the course this holiday season.  Getting what one wants and getting what one needs is rarely the same thing.

That being said, the heart of the movie (and again, I’m not giving away anything that’s not been in the trailers) is hope.  Rebellions are built on hope.  The need to protect hope at all costs is the driving force of the movie.  I think it’s also the driving force for me this Christmas, and in a lot of ways it was the driving force of that first Christmas.  Jesus came down in the most unlikely of ways in the most unlikely of places to bring hope to the hopeless.  He showed us that even in the most dire circumstances, there is always hope of something better, something we haven’t even imagined yet.

And while I am lost and sad and scared, I am not without hope.  My faith in Jesus and my understanding of the Christmas story gives me hope that there are things on the horizon that I have not yet dreamed of.

“But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.” Psalm 39:7

If rebellions are built on hope, and my hope is in God, that actually makes for a pretty powerful equation.

 

 

Christmas Song Blog Day 15 – Joy to the World

Okay, I have been a real downer lately, and I think that’s justifiable, but I also think I need to rage a  little bit against the dying of the light.  Today I was thinking of this Bible verse:

“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” 2 Corinthians 4:8-9

And while I have been pretty close to despair lately, I do know that I have not been abandoned.  That’s the theme of my song blogs this year.  That even in the worst of times, especially in the worst of times, there is Emmanuel.  God with us.  Even when there is joy in nothing else, there is joy in that, right?

And just because we feel joy doesn’t mean we stop feeling pain. Sometimes we are only truly capable of feeling joy because we know the opposite end of the spectrum.  Joy in the face of everything good isn’t really that big a deal, but finding joy on the brink of despair can be an act of rebellion. There is nothing homophobes hate more than gay people living happily. There is nothing racists hate more than smiling Black faces. There is something powerful in saying, “Devil, you can’t take my joy.”

Today I am working on finding some of that kind of joy.  It doesn’t mean I am ignoring the pain in the world, or the fear, or the anger burning in me. It just means that I am also doing the important work of making space for something else. And, if you think about it, making room where there doesn’t seem to be any is a big part of the Christmas message.

Christmas Song Blog Day 14 – Coventry Carol

Today I am in mourning. I mourn for the lives of children I never knew. The children crushed or dying beneath the rubble of Allepo, the children living in hunger in our own cities, the children of Sandy Hook who died in vain, and the countless others who have been gunned down in the years since we as a culture decided that sort of thing didn’t really bother us badly enough to take action to save them.

Christ gave us a very clear model on how we should view children:

“People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.” Mark 10:13-16

The Christmas story tells us a tale of what not to do.

“When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.” Matthew 2:16

This is not a some great commentary that’s going to open anyone’s eyes.  If the events of the world haven’t done that yet, nothing I can say here will soften your hard heart. I only point out this contrast between Jesus and the people who opposed him in order to say this: Everyone claims they want to follow Jesus. I’ve yet to hear anyone lift up Herod as anything but one of the worst villains in the history of all mankind, and yet that’s not the world we actually live in.

Christmas isn’t always a happy story.  Christmas isn’t always about what God did for us.  Sometimes Christmas shows us what we do to God, and those lesson are rarely easy to face. The comparison between Jesus and Herod should not even have to be mentioned, but it does, because we as a society continue to be much closer to the Herod end of the spectrum than the Jesus end.

Sorry if you are waiting for this blog to work around to something warm fuzzy.  It’s not going to. We have failed the children of this world. We continue to fail them every day. It is our sacred duty to lift up children, to see the Christ child in every single one of them, and we don’t.  Nor do we make sure they see Christ in each of us.  We are not saviors in this story. We are Herods.

I mourn for our children and I mourn for our own humanity.

Christmas Song Blog Day 13 – Strange Way to Save the World

Today’s news is once again overwhelming. The horror of Allepo, the insanity of Trump’s nominees, the continued lack of action and outrage over a foreign government undermining our national sovereignty, and yet everyone seems to be hung up on Kayne West visiting Trump Tower. I want to scream, “Eye on the freaking ball people.”

Have I mentioned I’m struggling a little bit this holiday season?  I am. I just don’t understand the world we live in. I heard a guy say today that everything happens for a reason and God must have a plan. I wanted to say, “What if the reason is that people are horrible, and the plan is to let us face the consequences of our actions?”

You see, platitudes like that don’t work for me because I don’t believe that’s how God works. I don’t think of God as some puppet master up there in heaven pulling all our strings. I think of God as a creator, loving and kind, who gave us an example of how to live in Jesus, and gave us the guidance of the Holy Spirit to help us along the way, but who also gave us free will to make our own choices no matter how heinous they may be. Free will is not actually free will unless humans can chose the worst possible option. If God let us choose between only doing good and doing great, that would be limited will, and no choice would ever be a true choice. You cannot choose to follow God unless you also have the choice not to.

But does that mean we’re just on our own now?  Are we alone to reap what we’ve sown?  You could hardly blame God for that. And yet I don’t think that’s quite true either, or at least it hasn’t been true to my experiences. I said earlier I don’t think of God as a puppet master, but I don’t think of God as remote, either. Honestly, if you need a metaphor, my view of God is closest to that of the woman on my GPS. I know that sounds a little irreverent, but it works for me because her goal is always the same. The address of my destination was entered at my birth. It’s God’s address, or at least the one that gets me closest to God. And my GPS woman, she tells me how to get there. Only sometimes I don’t listen. Sometimes I make a wrong turn by accident. Sometimes I take a detour of my own choosing. Sometimes I think I know a shortcut and try to take it. I believe that at each turn I make the God GPS sigh and say, “Recalculating.” And God does. God finds the new best route from wherever I am in that moment. It might add time and miles to the trip, but God always find a route back to the path I was supposed to be on.

This method is not efficient. It’s highly individualized and leaves endless room for human error. It doesn’t made for easy planning, and it doesn’t offer one-size-fits-all answers. And honestly sometimes I’m not sure it’s working at all. But I do know that no matter where we go or what we do or how far we wander off the path set before us, God has seen worse.  God has found people in worse places and situations and still managed to use them for good. No, I don’t believe that God ordained the problems we are having. I don’t think God planned for the worst to happen, but I do believe that God can work a plan to get us out. It not be easy or clean or pretty or fun, but it is possible, and thankfully we have Christmas to prove that. If God can take a helpless, vulnerable baby in a run-down town teeming with masses of humanity under foreign occupation and turn all that into a story of hope and love and salvation, then God can undoubtedly work miracles here and now, too.