Merry Christmas!

           

My sister Valen took this photo of our family when she and her husband Kurt visited at Thanksgiving.  Here’s what you can expect if you come to visit!

            Want to hold our little ray of sunshine?  Sean Edward was born on May 19 as the morning sun streamed through the window.  He loves three things best: bath time, the first two fingers on his right hand, and sleeping smack dab in the middle of his two old people.

            It’s hard to get a word in edgewise at our supper table.  Leah and Willem like to lay out every detail of the overwhelmingly original plot of the latest Hardy Boys mystery they’ve shared.  Willem will probably point out the tree house he’s building in the backyard.  Leah’s liable to relate her recent horseback riding lesson.

            Devotions commence when Miss Meticulous finally clears her plate.  Maries enjoys kindergarten so much she can’t think of a favorite thing at the end of the school day: “Every part of it was my favorite, Mom!” 

            Can’t find Nathan?  Look downstairs.  He hibernates down there for hours at time, perfectly content with LEGOs and the latest audio book.  Eli’s acquired Nath’s former fascination with all things train.  Would you please read to him The Little Engine That Could?  B.J. and I are pretty burned out with that book.  (BJ: Dear, I cannot read this book again.  I cannot, I cannot, I cannot…  Sarah: Oh, I think you can, I think you can, I think you can…  ;-)

            BJ continues to alternate between two jobs he loves: teaching and concrete.  He also started a small computer repair business this year – another endeavor that he enjoys.  I’m pretty much the same, just a year older and (I hope) a year wiser.  My days are full of opportunities to exercise faithfulness in the mundane yet infinitely inestimable moments that motherhood brings.

            How the light shone when our Savior was born!  May the light of his glorious gospel shine in your heart throughout the coming year.

Singspirations and Sentimentality

                One of my favorite childhood Christmas traditions was our annual trek to small town Edgerton, Minnesota.

                I suppose every church or denomination of churches has instances of its own customs or quirky lingo.  In the PRC, one of those customs is the recurring, celebratory, inter-church sing-alongs that we call “singspirations.”  I can still hear some of my high school friends say, “You’re going to a what?  A sing-sper-what?”

                Among the PR churches in the Midwest, singspirations are organized by the young people of each congregation, and each congregation has its own holiday singspiration to host.  The Christmas singspiration has been held in the little white clapboard church building in Edgerton for as long as I can remember.  And nothing short of all-out blizzard kept my parents from making the hour-long trip north.

                When I was growing up, my parents drove a full-size, rust-colored 1972 Chevy van.  The van seated twelve, though there were functioning seatbelts for maybe five or six.  The bench seats were mismatched, and cream-colored curtains hung in the windows.  The carpet was green shag, and the gas cap had been procured from a VW somewhere along the way.  If you sat on the second bench seat, all the way in, you had a footrest: the box heater that was capable of scorching the legs of those directly next to it and in front of it while the rest of the van remained just above freezing.

                When we drove to the singspiration on those December Sunday evenings, we’d be dressed in our church clothes.  Christmas dresses, if we had them, tights, and bulky coats with enormous fur-lined hoods.  We’d fight over the warm seats as we piled in and snuggled under the afghans that Mom stowed in the van every winter.  I can remember bucking snowdrifts already on our own gravel road, Dad muttering about the wisdom in going at all, yet still we went.  And all the way we’d read with flashlights, look out the frosty windows at the stars, point out the places whose farmers had braved the cold to string Christmas lights, and sing carols. 

                When we got to the little white church in Edgerton, we’d pile out of the van and clatter our way downstairs to use the toilet before clacking our way back upstairs and filing into one of the wooden bench seats.  The singspiration itself was always a joy, the pews packed, the Christmas carols, hymns and psalms accompanied by the lusty pipe organ.  Afterwards we’d click our way back downstairs for cookies before braving the wintry night once more for the drowsy drive home.

                This year, if the Lord wills, I might make it to Edgerton this coming Sunday evening for the singspiration again.  If we make it, my husband and I will transport our own flashlight-reading, carol-singing crew in our own Chevy van, with its able heater.  Maybe.  We have miles to go and children that may need sleep before that will happen.  But maybe.

                Christmas is a season that lends itself to sentimentality, isn’t it?  And some of my musing about the Christmas singspiration is sentimental.  Some of it, though, is my own way of recalling the years of the Most High, of communing with my own heart and exclaiming, “Lord, how good you are!  How kind, and how faithful you have been to me in my life!  Indeed, all of your promises in Jesus Christ are Yes! and Amen!”

The Christian faith is not backward-reaching: it’s future-seeking.  It’s a faith that doesn’t dwell in the past but presses forward to our glorious expected end.  It’s my prayer that as you look backward this Christmas season to the birth of our Savior, you’ll do so longing for his second Advent, that great, final coming when he will make all things new.  Blessed Christmas to you, friends.

Two Mothers, One Promise

The Christmas story is a tale of two mothers.  Two mothers, and one promise.

The tale begins with our first mother, Eve.  Eve was created perfect.  She lived in the first Paradise with her husband, whose helper God had created her to be.  With Adam she experienced perfect fellowship with God. But all that changed when Eve was deceived by the servant, usurped Adam’s authority with her executive action, and disobeyed God.  Eve wasn’t content with the way God had made her, nor with the position in which he had placed her.  She wanted to be as God, “knowing good and evil.”  Adam followed her into transgression, and so they and the entire human race were enslaved to sin.  They, who had been the friends of God, were now His enemies.  Man’s will was no longer free, but bound to sin.

The disobedience of the “the mother of all living” brought death to all her children.

But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, promised that he would send a Savior to rescue Adam and Eve and their posterity.  That Savior would crush the head of Satan, their adversary and the adversary of their children.  He would save them from the death that would now mark every moment of their earthly existence.

That Savior was born of another mother.  The mother of the Savior did not live in Paradise, but in Roman-occupied Palestine.  She had no husband, though she was betrothed to be married.  This young woman hoped in the same promise that had been Eve’s comfort.  But Mary showed herself submissive to God’s perfect will.  When the angel Gabriel appeared, hailed her as one “highly favored,” and revealed to her that God had chosen her to be the mother of His Son, this was Mary’s humble reaction to the angel’s astonishing message:  “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”

And so, through the obedience of the virgin mother, God brought life to as many as believe on his name.

There are some who worship that virgin mother rather than the blessed Savior whom she brought forth.  Like the woman in Luke 11:27, they cry, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked!”  They disregard Jesus’ response, “‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’”

All these things happened unto Eve and Mary for our example: “and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come” (1 Cor. 10:11).  The promise to which those women clung is still the promise that is the basis of all our hope: our Lord is coming!  Still today God comes to us in his Word, salutes us in Jesus Christ as those who are highly favored, and calls us to obey his commands.

The disobedience of our first mother brought death.  The Spirit-worked obedience of the mother of our Lord brought life.   Do you walk the way of the first mother or the second?

Blessed are all they who hear the word of God and do it.           

Hallelujah!

Do you remember the Hallelujah Chorus food court flash mob?  Our kids do, and they request to watch this video every year around this time.  :-)

Sean E. - 6 months

Sean E. - can it be?!  Six months already!

And big brother for good measure.  "My turn, Mom!"  :-)