This was the crazy freakin' sunset I drove past tonight.

I screamed bloody murder about it to Kym on my cell phone, pulled over, and spent fifteen minutes staring and taking pictures.

 

 

  

The fact that there was a huge beautiful farmhouse with a porch and Christmas lights made me even happier (if it was possible).

Nine years...

And the scene hasn't changed.

.Our Companion.

  

"This is the great mystery of Christmas 

that continues to give us comfort and consolation:

we are not alone on our journey.

The God of love who gave us life

sent his only Son to be with us at all times and in all places,

so that we never have to feel lost in our struggles

but always can trust that He walks with us.

Christmas is the renewed invitation

not to be afraid and to let Him-

whose love is greater than our own hearts and minds can comprehend-

be our companion."

-Nouwen

How to sanitize a Christmas present for your 13-year-old sister.

 

Yes, those would be the bodies of snowmen glued on top of her Hollister gift card.

Let it be known throughout the North Pole that I am no prude, but seriously?!! Someone please explain to me the purpose of a clothing store advertising with pictures of people not wearing any clothes. (...Actually, please don't.) It may be the current store of choice for all the coolest girls in her class (or so I've been informed), but thanks, I am not giving that to an 8th grader.

After some thought, I decided the snowmen were too boring.

Festive as well as decent. Much better. Feliz navidad!

.why Christmas means more to me as an adult.

After HNGR, and cancer, and after a year and a half of post-grad life, and after, I think, a little bit more understanding that, no matter how filled with joy and love my life is (and oh is it!),
this world is not my home and the point of life is not to be happy and without pain.

"The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul,
who know themselves to be poor and imperfect,
who look forward to something greater to come. 
...the Holy One himself comes down to us,
God in the child in the manger.
God comes.
The Lord Jesus comes.
Christmas comes.
Christians rejoice!...

We are no longer alone. God is with us."

-Bonhoeffer, Christmas Sermons

Such comfort and joy in heartache or fear:

with Christmas everywhere around me, I'm reminded...

not that things are easy or painless, but that in all things:

incarnation, He walked our earth, Emmanuel, God-with-us,

He abides in us.

(HT for Bonhoeffer quote)

Watch this.

Please.

I haven't seen something that moved me so much in a long time.

For more back story on this new family, click here.

Christmas Run with the Ramsings.

The parental units of my lovely second family and I headed to Baltimore at a crazy early hour yesterday for the annual Celtic Solstice five mile race.
(So, if you kind of cut corners on training because you're studying for finals, and then getting to and from the car adds a total of four miles, and you do a five mile run... your knees hurt the next day.
Just fyi.)

It was a really, really, really fun day.

I wanted to make sure I was taken seriously, so I dressed for the part.

(Everyone around me was probably intimidated, right?)

 If I could just get these two to lighten up every once in awhile...

Yay us!!

Love Christmas, love running, love making memories, love them.

First day home for break.

"I went in your room and just stared at you this morning for a long time while you slept...

it was really fun."

-My mother.

I'm glad she loves me so much.

(...Pretty sure that's the only person I ever want to hear that particular phrase from, though.)

I love:

Instrumental Christmas music.

Christmas lights.

Professors who care about me as a person.

My cohort all laughing together (even when it's at me...wow what a new group dynamic for me.)

The fact that I have a cuddly cohort. Thank God.

Text from Mere: "Happy Friendaversary!"- it was the annual Rez volunteer breakfast, where last year we sat and talked for two hours.

Email from Josh: "Hi friend! Just wanted to send some encouragement your way this morning..."

Watching movies with my roommate in her bed at night.

Bugging Chet on gchat.

Night runs under starry Oregon skies (I take a buddy when it's afte dark, Mom, don't worry).

My assigned upper-class mentor- she's the best.

Text from Christine Will: "I had a dream that the three of us met at a Panera somewhere in the middle of the US. There happened to be a chalkboard, so we drew friendship maps and talked about how different people have blessed and influenced our lives this year."

Telling a professor who just had her first baby, "He's so beautiful!", and her excited reply, "I know, isn't he?!"

Brilliant sunrise sky shining over a low layer of fog over the vineyards.

Little girls running to hug me when I walk in the coffee shop.

Raspberry syrup in my coffee.

Psalm 139.

Girls' night with cohort friends, and an afternoon with all of us lying talking on my bed.

Cuddling and reading Christmas stories with children.

Newberg Friends Church.

And the kids being adorable in the Christmas pageant last weekend.

Coffee dates with wise older-than-me women in my small group.

The strong women in Wendell Berry's fiction.

Justin McRoberts's version of O Little Town of Bethlehem.

An email from Lindsay ending in, "Okay, time to go feed the baby!"

Baking Christmas cookies with an almost 3 year old.

Lessons learned from baking cookies with an almost 3 year old... if you tell a toddler that eating raw cookie dough is bad for her as you sneak a bite, it does not have the effect you hoped for. And no matter how stern she's being, it is still funny when you hear your cousin-in-law scold her child for throwing a piece of the nativity scene, "You need a time out! That was NOT nice to the baby Jesus!!"

Twenty-two hour whirlwind Seattle trips.

The familiarity of beloved faces I've been looking at for years.

Two-minute mid-work-day phone calls from across the country asking for prayer.

Feeling known and so happy here... and realizing I'm not leaving anytime soon.

Feeling sad after finals because it means the semester is ending.

.long-awaited Holy stranger.

tears are falling, hearts are breaking

how we need to hear from God

You've been promised, we've been waiting

welcome, holy child,

welcome, holy child...

fragile finger sent to heal us

tender brow prepared for thorn
tiny heart Whose blood will save us
unto us is born,
unto us is born


so wrap our injured flesh around You
breathe our air and walk our sod
rob our sin and make us holy
perfect Son of God,
perfect Son of God

incarnate: embodied in flesh; given a bodily, especially a human, form

Rhythms.

"We give thanks for your ordered gift of life to us,

       for the rhythms that reassure,

       for the equilibriums that sustain."

"We treasure from you,

days to work and nights to rest.

We cherish from you,

days to control and nights to yield.

We savor from you,

days to plan and nights to dream."

-Walter Brueggeman,

"Our true home"

parents: mine.

Reading up on Reactive Attachment Disorder at Chapters...

Me via text to both of them: Thanks for warmly and consistently interacting with me in my infancy!!

Obviously without knowing the other's response, they both replied within a minute:

Mom: My pleasure!

Dad: The pleasure was all mine!

They're keepers.

On Psalm 95.

"Oh come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In His hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are His also. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put Me to the test and put Me to the proof, though they had seen Me work."  (Psalm 95:1, 3-4, 7-8)

That psalm is prayed every day in the church liturgy. Of all the psalms, when the church fathers chose what to include, what they thought we need to hear and pray daily, they chose that one. Why?

I first heard that question explored at a service at Rez last winter. I remember how Justin showed the place where the voice in the Scripture changes: from about God, to God speaking. Up through verse seven we are speaking of God, but at verse eight, He speaks to us:


"...on the day at Massah, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen me work."

That's a reference to Exodus 17. Verse 7 tells us exactly what God is referring to here, what happened at Meribah and Massah. Moses had just led the Israelites out of Egypt, into freedom...


"[Moses] called the place Massah and Meribah (testing and quarrelling), because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord saying, 'Is the Lord among us or not?'".

I was literally breathtaken as I read the words of that psalm, the one the church fathers decided out of a hundred and fifty psalms we need to read every day. Breathtaken with conviction as I saw spelled out, by the Israelites, exactly the question my mind and heart wonder so often.


Is the Lord among us or not.

Is God really guiding this decision I have to make... or not.
Did God see my girls... or not.
Was He with them... or not.
Is any work occurring in my heart... or not.
Am I changing and growing... or not.
Did that conversation happen for a reason... or not.
Does He know how she's hurting?
Is He working in his struggle?
Could my flaws and failures screw everything up?
Does good really come from pain?
Did You know that was going to happen?


Are You among us, or not?

Awareness of that question in my heart has changed my prayers since hearing that sermon.
My prayers in fear; my prayers in uncertainty; my prayers in the various new seasons of the last year; my anguished prayers, still, looking at sweet girls whose lives seem so unfair to me.

I don't have answers. I don't like pain. I hate what those girls- what everyone who's known real suffering- have gone through. I still have very little understanding how the whole our-decisions-affect-our-lives vs. God-is-sovereign-and-guiding thing works.

But I have 'seen Him work', and I know that He is among us.


I may not know what You're doing, God.
I may not understand the balance of Your will and my decisions.
I may not like what You're doing,
and sometimes I may not see if You're 'doing' anything at all.
But, when I ask that question, I can answer: yes.
Whatever it is that You're doing-
yes, You are here. You are among us.

Send a Christmas card to a street kid in Seattle?

From one of the blogs that's had the biggest impacts on my life, an opportunity:

"Would you like to send a Christmas card to a street kid in Seattle?  This is a very simple opportunity to show love to the fatherless by extending kindness to a young person living on the streets – in a big city – where it rains all the time – in the winter – where it can be a dark and frightening place... Would you do a simple “mom task” for a street kid in Seattle?  You can Be That Mom by sending a Christmas card to a street kid that will be tucked into a backpack of supplies and passed out this month. "

More details here:  Be That Mom

Me with some of my faves:

Officially my favorite picture ever.

We had coffee together every week for five years. 

Including on her wedding day.

I talked to her for an hour and a half last night while sitting in a coffee shop...

she was 2,000 miles away, but it still fed (caffeinated?) my soul.

So grateful for her and our friendship.

(photo credit: Yeesum Photography!!)