Merry Christmas

An unused nappy lies on the couch. A pair of sheepskin slippers for a baby tumble together with various cars and toy animals on the floor. Family beginning to come ‘home’ to the ‘hillock for the holidays.

The Mighty One has done great things for me, Mary sang. I sing the same song.

For ten days we have struggled to get our central heating fixed. Unfortunately, we had ‘O’Reilly’ (Fawlty Towers fans will understand) out to fix it. Only because he was available, and we didn’t know. Now we know. Yesterday we had a new man come who has got it going, though it isn’t completely fixed yet.

Preparations for the family’s arrival in full swing, last night the element in the main oven broke. At other times of the year, this doesn’t matter. Don and I can get by. But with family, with a rare moment of gathering together, with babies and toddlers, not to mention an outsized turkey thawing for tomorrow, timing is not right.

The temptation is to ask, why us? Why now? We’ve had a challenging year, so why not end 2019 with a challenge?

So, as Don heads to Aberdeen to try to find a new element for an old oven, and we start talking through contingency plans, it is good to read these words and hang with them, and let them hang with me. The Mighty One has done great things for me. And as the angel assured Mary, ‘nothing is impossible with God’.

In a day when folk are flooded and burnt out of their homes, refugees are in peril on the roads and seas fleeing from violence, homeless folk huddle in doorways and others struggle with pain and illness, a broken oven is ‘small potatoes’. Whatever happens, we will manage.

It will be a memorable Christmas. What more does anyone want?

Whatever your Christmas is looking like, it is good to reflect on the great things the Mighty One has done for you this year. It restores perspective.

Grace and peace today and always, and may Immanuel reveal himself in us more fully every day. Merry Christmas.

Cherish

Off to Cherish women’s conference in Leeds tomorrow early. When preparing to go away, I find it hard to get the balance between looking at what needs doing right now, with thinking ahead to what I need to do/take to Leeds. I’m dashing between the garden and bank forms and correspondence, baking bread for Don (in the bread-maker!) and thinking of what I’ll need at Cherish.

I like variety in my life. Nothing worse than rigid routine. But too much variety can make me feel like I’m fraying at the edges. Like I’m bound to forget something critical.

Commit your way to the Lord. He guides my steps, and nothing critical will be forgotten. Maybe some frivolous trivia will be left undone, left behind, but I trust him to remind me of the important things.

It’s maintaining the right perspective, isn’t it? In this case, it’s the happy anticipation of a few days away, worshipping God in the company of thousands of women, hearing inspiring messages and eating out!

Eternal Peace

Great weather is a great distraction, in every sense of that. With weeks of sunshine sans showers, our grass is brown and most of our usually-overgrown flower beds are weed-free. A new playhouse has been constructed and stands proudly in the corner of the garden having been inaugurated by happy grandchildren last week. We’ve been working hard in the sun but having fun in it too.

Meanwhile, more sedentary work has been ignored. Today, with a grey sky overhead and cooler temps, I plan to shift my attention, but feel slightly panicky that there is so much to do. Where do I begin? There is even more to do than I thought.

Jesus went to the cross focused on ‘the joy set before him’, not the pain of the cross. Not that I am facing a cross, but I pray that my focus today is on God, and that my perspective is eternal and not imminent.

Peace. Eternal peace.

Shadows and Camels

I saw a picture yesterday of a photograph which received an award from National Geographic. You may have seen it, too. Taken from high altitude, it showed trails of camels in the desert. It looked good, but it was only when I read the description of the picture that I realized how remarkable it was. 

The black camels which showed so clearly against the desert sands were actually the shadows of the real animals, which only showed up as white lines.

Our lives can be like that. Apparently unremarkable, looking (to us anyway) like nothing more than insignificant lines. The shadows cast by our lives, though, stretch further than we would imagine. Relationships, integrity, compassion, love: these things are observed by others seeing us from a different perspective.  

I want to live my life well, today and every day, so that the shadow I cast is a good one.

Perspectives

Just noticed the picture I posted last week of wee Flick peering underneath a wooden plank fence into someone else’s garden we were passing. Our perspective is always determined by our vantage point. 

When we are small, other things appear huge. We glimpse things differently than we do once we have grown a bit. 

Spiritually we are all at different points of growth. What appears a big deal to one person may seem small to someone else.

Be

Pull back. Gain perspective.

Lean in. Smell the fragrance of love.

Look up. See the glory breaking through the clouds.

Look out. Experience the breathtaking beauty of this world.

Sit still. Allow the divine artist to colour your thoughts.

Breathe deep. Inhale the life-giving Spirit.

Let go. Trust God to hold you.

Listen. Hear his voice.

Myopia

Picked up my new specs this morning. These new glasses replace an earlier pair of Varifocal lenses – it seems as a person ages, long-distance vision improves while close-up sight declines.  I can’t say I’m very excited by my appearance in these new glasses – basically, I’d quite like to look like I’m 20 and with my now clearer vision I see there is no hope for that! 

As I drove home, I heard on the radio of the death of a writer at age 63. I am going to be 65 in April. Suddenly my perspective shifted and I saw clearly the blessing of being alive and healthy despite appearance changing. The big picture snapped into focus, and with the help of these new glasses, the detail is visible too!

It’s hard to dismiss feelings about ageing, but I want to walk gracefully into the sunset rather than pretending to still be young. I know, I know: young at heart is more important than number of years... but ... 

When I allow my eyes to lift from the bespectacled image in the mirror to the everlasting God who welcomes me to spend eternity with him, my myopic vision clears and I rejoice. (I am hoping, however, that in eternity there will be no need for glasses...)

Cropped out

A trip to Costco this morning to print off over 500 pictures from our Russian trip, and a few family photos as well. The friendly assistant showed me that I would need to check that nobody’s head was cropped off because the relative size was different (not sure I understand why...) So I was there for an hour making sure that what I thought was the pivotal point of each picture was, in fact, not cropped out.

Perception is a funny thing. While looking at a landscape, my eyes might be drawn to a beautiful sky while my companion’s might focus on unique rock formations or glorious trees. If we were both to photograph it, the lens of my camera would be pointed skywards while my companion’s would drop lower than that. 

Since Don took most of the pictures, I do hope that I haven’t messed up the compositions he thought he was artistically putting together.

It’s one thing to have different perceptions when gazing at scenery or churches or statues or whatever. Quite another thing to have different perspectives on life. Jesus is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, and so all true perspectives must line up with his perspective. Ephesians tells us that we believers are seated with Jesus beside the Father in heaven already, so we already share his perspective on the world. We don’t always appreciate that. We don’t always calibrate ourselves to the values and standards God sets; we don’t always nurture a relationship with the Father which enables us to share his viewpoint. More often than not our vision is narrowed by our own experiences and judgments, and we sacrifice the freedom God gives us to put on a wide-angled lens when we look at others and at the world around us.

I’ve been thinking about my own dad a lot this last week. I always do in November, with all the remembrance activities, because he fought in the Pacific with the US Marines. His perspective on war was different from mine, because his experiences coloured his vision, just like my experiences colour mine. He dismissed me as a pacifist once during a verbal exchange, and I wish now that I had had the presence of mind to reply that pacifist or not, I thought he was a hero. I never told him that.

The crop marks on Dad’s and my perspectives of life would have fallen in different places and each of us would have seen a different composition when we looked at the world together. But common to both would have been Jesus and a desire to make our heavenly Father proud.