Advent Season began on Sunday. This is my favorite time of the year with all the beauty and stillness that come with it. It is time to sit and be still, to think, to ponder, to wonder, and to reach for hope.

Advent means coming. The birth of Jesus is coming. We are waiting for this event that brings hope, light, and goodness into this world. 

The boys and I are taking out the Advent Candle holder in the evenings. I read Scripture to them and we pray together. after supper We are also reading one of the many Christmas storybooks that I have collected over the years. I have three little Christmas sacks that I hide them in, and the boys take turns picking one to read. 

Yesterday was the first day that they were actually quite calm for the Advent readings. They answered questions and prayed. I had a moment where I thought "Wow" and was absolutely delighted that no one was insulting anyone. It was a joy!

And just in case you were wondering, we do have favorite storybooks that we read over and over again. I will share three of them here.
​

Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree is a delightful story of the tip of the Christmas tree being cut off in order for it to fit in Mr. Willowby's front room. The top of the tree travels to another part of the house, out of the house, and around the the neighborhood as all kinds of animals find it, are delighted with it, and then end up trimming it a little bit more in order to make it fit perfectly into whatever space they are dealing with.

This storybook is written as a long poem with rather delightful language. I enjoyed each and every rhyme. 

Yes, this was made into a TV movie back in 1995. Check it out on Youtube! 

The last book I will mention is Song of the Stars by Sally Lloyd Jones. Yes, this is the same person that wrote The Jesus Storybook Bible. This one features creation. Each and every animals is excited about the coming birth of Jesus. They seem to sense the magnificence of the event that is about to take place. Of course, the story culminates in the stable where all the animals gather around to see the baby who was born in a manger.
​

Another Advent tradition I have is the reading of great poetry. I enjoy this because it is one way to be still and just savor the moment. We all need these moments where nothing is happening, all is quiet, and just sit with ourselves.

There are too many good poets to mention here, so I will save it until next year! 

It is the middle of the week and everyone is in the house because of the Corona Virus. Justin has no schedule except to sit and study. Jordan has soccer practice on Monday and Wednesday. Aidan has study room everyday so he seems to be in the best shape of all of us. My husband went to school for a faculty meeting and I am trying to figure out how to teach online. 

This leaves us with lots of time on our hands. Way, way too much screen time for everyone! It would be so much better if I could just say, "Go play outside!" but this really isn't an option.

One of the good things about all of this time is I can read whenever I want to. I have been reading Faces at the Cross by J. Barrie Shepherd. I am reading this for Lent, which began last week. The book has more than 40 entries that are written in the first person. These are all people who were there during the Crucifixion. The entry I want to share with you is J. Barrie Shepherd's interpretation of what was going through Mary Magadelene's mind during the crucifixion.

The Face of Magdalen

So did we love him wrongly, after all?
Could this grim horror have been prevented?
Might it have never had to happen,
if we, if I, had only figured out the right way
to respond to all the love we found,
and felt and feasted on him. 

His love was unconditional,
always there for me,
even when he might have been provoked,
annoyed or disappointed 
in something I had said or done,
an attitude to others.
Our love -
mine I do know about, for sure - 
our love was always eager to possess. 
We loved him, those of us who got close enough,
just as one might love a thing of beauty,
cherishing its grace and loveliness, needing to reach out and grasp it,
have it be at our disposal, 
ready to be enjoyed at any moment.

He said his love, God's love, 
was just like that, 
was always there for us,
shining on us like the sun,
and would never let us down.
We didn't have to make it ours,
lock it up and throw away the key,
couldn't do that anyway, 
because God's love can not be held, 
can only be received and passed along.

And right then,
when we were with him, 
where he was tell us all this,
we could believe it, at least I could.
Trouble was,
he wasn't always there
and then the doubts began again.

You see, love is such a basic thing,
being loved is so important that,
if you can't be certain sure God loves you
then you just have to love yourself.
You have to watch out all the time
to make sure you don't get hurt.
You have to realize,
accept the fact that everybody else 
is busy loving their own selves.
So you can never fully trust them
because finally, when a life is on the line,
they will want it to be yours, 
rather than theirs.

See what happened to him.
See where his God-love got him in the end.
Do you suppose he still believes in it up there?
Do you think, with all the hurt and hate
He's seen these past few hours,
he still hangs on to what he taught,
and walked and worked at with us
all those weeks and months
that seemed to be leading toward forever
till they ended with a crash?

Now even the two thieves 
are cursing at him in their desperation.
Why must they pick on him?
Didn't they know?
His suffering's as bad as theirs,
and he's done nothing to deserve it.
Just to listen to them argue,
even up there when all is lost 
they can't agree on anything it seems.

What's that?
One of them is defending Jesus,
asking him to bless him in his death?
And jesus is assuring him or paradise,
blessing the legionaries too
as they gamble for his seamless robe.

What love is this?
What wondrous love is this?
Of all the miracles
I've witnessed these past months,
the miracle he brought about in my own life, 
this is the richest, truest of them all.
Even death, this cruel, bloody death,
cannot quench the flow of God's love in this man,
this man I love, and learn to in God by.

His body weakens fast now.
It's getting harder and harder for him to breathe.
And yet the love, God's love in him,
goes on, and on, and on.
It's almost as if that love can never die;
almost as if, beyond the grave, 
God's love in him will still go on,
will still be with me giving strength 
to love the way he did,
even to die the way he dies,
God grant it may be so.

One thing I know, 
whether we loved him wrong or not,
he loved us right.

______________________

Christ loves us in a way we can barely comprehend. He endured the cross for us. I am more and more certain of my own sinfulness as I walk through this life, but Jesus died to change all that. His arms are stretched out toward you. Accept his gift! 

​I have been reading through the gospels about the crucifixion as I prepare Sunday School sermons leading up to Easter. Yesterday and today, I spent quite a bit of time reading through the chapters in the gospels leading up to the point where Christ died.


​
I admit, it is incredibly hard to get through the story. I continually see an innocent man wrongly accused, political maneuvering, and tragic circumstances.

I love the change in the story as it moves from an innocent death to a realization that this death, this sacrifice, really is the Son of God giving up his life for others. 

As it turns upside down, love and grace win. Jesus is the beautiful sacrifice. His legacy is love, eternal life, good triumphing over evil, love winning over legalism.

And it got me thinking about legacy. What do I want my legacy to be?

I hope and pray my legacy to those around me will be a life that brings others into their own God-given grace. I hope that the power of grace that lives in me will encourage and help others to live out their own stories of grace and compassion. My story leads into other stories of how God changes lives and how those lives change others.

I believe that part of my legacy is in the words that I write so, here are some words to think about that I hope will encourage loved ones.

Live in Jesus. Walk your road with Him. Dance to music, cry with Him, learn from Him, be with him. Tell others about him.

Every day, every year that I know Him, He gets better. He gets better because I know more surely for who he is.

Jesus satisfies. His way brings peace and His love brings healing. Never allow circumstances to overshadow this reality. 

Celebrate life, every day, as often as you can. 

He has planted sunrises and had the sun set to remind you and I that He is there at the beginning of the day and at the end. 

When your burdens are heavy, He has your back and your front.

Don't waste time in the guilt of never being good enough. He is good enough, and your nearness to Him makes you good too. 

Give grace to everyone you meet. Bitterness kills the mind and soul. 

Don't take on the anger and guilt of others. Just wait patiently for darkness to pass. 

Remember that I am praying for you, believing in you, thanking God for you. The story of our lives together will be told forever throughout eternity.

Show others the love and grace of Jesus, and then, when hearts are open, tell them about how they may know Him. 

Teach your children and other children about Him every day and live with integrity in front of them because you are the first Bible they will ever read. You and I can pass on His messages and righteousness from one generation to another. 

Whatever you do, do it for God's glory. Create music, write books, cook meals, plant flowers, build websites. Do whatever God has gifted you to do. Use all that you have for his glory.

Like Paul, at the end, I want to say that I have fought the good fight and finished the course set out for me. It is a privilege to be able to walk hand in hand with Him everyday and to be a part of His Kingdom.

Dark tests do come, but remember they are temporary. He left us His peace, and He reminded us to take courage. 

Take courage. Hold fast. This trial will pass soon enough, and you will have an amazing story to tell.

Think of the feasting that is to come in heaven. Hold on to that in all trials. In the end, there is a party, a great feast, a beautiful rousing of other believers telling their stories of how HE changed it all. We will break the bread, drink the wine, celebrate His presence. 

​Believe and celebrate.

Dear Mid-Life 40 something Birthday person (mainly me) but a few others including Wanda, Sumitra, Ann, Elizabeth, and others,

Happy Birthday! When you blow out your candles ponder over these things and whatever else your heart tells you to focus on. 

40-something. You’re about half way through life, old BraveHeart. Half way.

So let’s live backwards from your 90th birthday cake. We should always Live backward from the end goal. Look at who’s in the room singing off tune on your 90th birthday — and who are you making room for right now?

I want to be the weathered woman of 9 decades, still excited about life and God and grace, hunched over her cake, looking around a room of babies slung on hips and grinning teenagers and the gathering of the generations. I hope they sing old hymns and new style praise songs. I want to sing Amazing Grace to this group and recite Psalm 23 by heart and count our blessings together and eat cake.

I envision a rising of accents and the richness of skin colours and a poverty of spirit that knows the luckiness of Jesus-grace, and I hear the raucous of a room of the gloriously rowdy and live your life backwards from that last birthday cake. (Ann Voskamp)


What are my priorities that will be celebrated at this 90th birthday party? These are the things I’m focusing on now. My principles for this 90 year life.

1. Keep young people around. Especially the little people. They see things you are bound to miss without them.  Thank you Jordan for focusing on love, hugs, kisses, fun and sweetness.  Making a small person one of your greatest priorities makes your life great.

2. Read! Read the Bible. Reread books that touched you when you were younger. Read things that show you how to be a more compassionate human being. Read up on a new interest area. Learn something new. 

3. Stay in love. I’m holding on to this with all my life. Stay in touch, stay in truth and grace, and stay in the Story and, above all else: stay in love. Life is too short to move on to anything else. And mid-life is flat-out begging you: Risk it all. Risk large, risk now, risk your heart, risk for what ultimately matters.

Go back to school. Go reconcile. Go make it right. Invest in a dream that terrifies you. Do the hard thing that terrifies you. Start a business, a class, a soup kitchen, a friendship, a dinner club, a memoir, a church, a marathon, a family. Just start. Start over.
​
4. You life is art. Rake the risk and create! Risk is your friend who walks with you where you want to go. Risk is the friend who knows the way to where you want to go. Enjoy risk’s company.

5. Live into something bigger than you, that will require more than you, that will require faith and hope and miracles and God.Why waste your one life on any one’s small box?
Believe it:

6. Our God is a good God. Pray to Him. Make your life a prayer.Make your work your worship, make your days your doxology, make your life your liturgy, and make Christ your only King. Your work may burn up or cause you to burn out, but the prayers enfolded into the stacks of laundry, the stirred soup, the stairs swept — they will survive fire.

7. The cure to anxiety and an overwhelmed life begins with a daily overdose of Scripture. (Keep trying to memorize it)
Leave a Bible open to the Psalms by the sink, on the desk, at the table, eat His book every time you eat because the truth is: Stay in His Story to stay walking on waves.

What you focus on — is what you become like.
What you focus on — is what you become like.
Focus on good — and you’ll see more good everywhere to focus on.

8. Give more grace than advice.

9. You integrity is you only legacy. Hunger for integrity more than popularity, celebrity, or prosperity, — because your integrity is your only legacy.

10. Being broken is good. It keeps you soft and open and things can grow in soft and open spaces.

Let the rains come down into the soil of your heart, let whatever needs to rain simply come, and grow whatever He needs to grow, however He needs to grow it, because He reigns and knows what is best, and in our tender surrender, the glory of our God wins.

There may be another 40-something years left, there may only be another 16,425 days left.

And honestly? As many days, as moments, between here and 90, or as many remain?
​
At this 90-something party, I want to eat the cake of amazing grace. Pay attention to God. Pay attention to my family. Worship God in all that I do.
Be grateful, live given, show grit. 

I am a part of that epic story just as you are a part of that epic story! Your life will be celebrated in glory because you were created and imagined by a loving, beautiful, glorious Savior who cares for you. (Psalm 139:23-24)

Have a piece of that amazing grace cake!

"Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness"  Psalm 29:2 KJV

This is a provocative phrase that sets two nouns that do not ordinarily hang out together, beauty and holiness, in company with the verb worship.  Worship, an energetic and all involving verb.

Beauty is splendor, grandeur, adornment. Life - core existence - spills over the containers of mere survival or utility. 

Holiness. An interior fire, a passion for living in and for God. A capacity for exuberance in the presence of God. In His presence there are springs deep within and around us which we drink and sing God.

It's life really. Beauty is the outside and holiness the inside of what is essentially the same thing. It is life God created and God blessed, life here and now. 

When we get glimpses of the intricate connections between everything we see and can't see, the usual metaphor is "heaven and earth". When we sense the pulse and surge of life within and around us, our spontaneous response is to worship.

Worship is the most soul-involving, reality-assimilating act available to human beings. We are most ourselves, our image-of-God selves, when we worship: "O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."

_________

Of course, the issue is that both beauty and holiness are in short supply. Beauty is commonly trivialized in our culture, reduced to pretty or nice, or it is mere decoration.

But beauty isn't an add-on. It is not an extra. Its not what we pay attention to when we break from reality. Beauty is fundamental. It is evidence of inherent wholeness and goodness of things. It is life in excess of what we can manage or make on our own. 

Beauty arrives through a sustained and adorational attentiveness to what is there: a rock, a flower, a bird, a face, a rustle in the trees, a storm crashing through the mountains.

When we are tired and our senses dull and our attention wavers, writers, singers, artists, all grab us and say, "Look, listen, feel! Embrace and respond to life within you and around you!" This is what the poet of Psalm 29 is doing.

"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver wrote these words and it adequately captures verse two.

If the fate of beauty in culture is to be trivialized, the fate of holiness is to be reduced to blandness. Many sectarian groups reduce life to behaviors and cliches that can be certified as safe. Goodness in a straitjacket if you will, truth drained of mystery, beauty reduced to platitudes or knickknacks. Ellen Glasgow had a wonderful line in her autobiography where she described her father, a Presbyterian elder full of rectitude and rigid with duty: "He was entirely unselfish, and in his long life ... never committed a pleasure."

Holiness is in wild opposition to all this banality and blandness. We are introduced to it through the stories of the burning bush in Midian, the mountain on fire at Sinai, the smoke and angel filled temple in Jerusalem. We find ourselves in the presence of God alive, with life far in excess of anything we imagined. This God-life cannot be domesticated or used: it can only be entered into on its own terms. Moses and Isaiah walked out of those stories on fire themselves, energized for lifelong, life-giving vocations. Holiness did not make God smaller so they could use God in convenient and manageable projects. It made those men larger.

Frederick Buechner took on the task of re-imagining holiness. He put the fire, the smoke, and the angels back into holiness and holy living. Leo Bebb in The Book of Bebb and Godric and Brendan, and hen with Jacob in The Son of Laughter, Buechner immersed us in convincing, contagious stories of holiness that exude life, stories of life giving, life enhancing, life-deepening holiness.

Here is the catch. Life, which is characterized by its modifier holiness as God's life and God-derived life, lavish and exuberant, beyond domestication and inaccessible to control, is mediated to us in beauty. Beauty.

Beauty is our sensory access to holiness. God reveals himself in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we use for these hints of more. Hints of transcendence that show us there is more going on than what we can account for.

We need to rub our noses in the stuff of this world, inhale its fragrance, press our hands in the clay, listen to songs and stories. God is our recruiting every writer, artist, musician, pastor, child, and parent he can find to help us do just that so we can worship the Lord in the beauty of Holiness.

________

The phrase "worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness" is embedded in the experience of wild, crashing thunderstorm. The storm is then turned into an extended metaphor in which the thunder is the voice of the Lord, qol-Yahweh. Seven great thunderclaps, seven times the Lord peals out:

The voice of the Lord is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the Lord, over many waters. (verse 3, ESV)

For the Hebrews, the waters were chaos, the uncontrollable and uncontrolled, the home of Leviathan, anticreation if you will. But when the voice of the Lord thunders over the waters, chaos becomes subject to creation: life, an allusion to Genesis 1, our first glimpse of the beauty of holiness.

Storms are splendid, beautiful, awesome. God is on display performing the beauty of holiness, and we have a ringside seat.

The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;
the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf,
and Sirion like a young wild ox. (verse 5-6, ESV)

Now the imagination of this praying poet takes off: the voice of the Lord splits huge trees into kindling for bonfires and turns immense mountains into a carnival of dancing animals. Lebanon is a grand mountain range to the north of Israel, and Siren is its largest mountain, a nine-thousand-foot snow-covered peak. The cedars of Lebanon, like the sequoias of California, were renowned for their monumental majesty. We are witness to a world at play to the glory of God, in the beauty of holiness.

The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. (verse 7, ESV)

Lightning bolts stab the darkness in a magnificent light show, each lightning strike illuminating another detail in the beauty of holiness.

The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. (verse 8, ESV)

An earthquake now. The Lebanon mountains at play to the north are matched by the Kadesh wilderness in ecstasy in the south. Earthquakes are normally frightening, but in this context we imagine something more like children skipping or bouncing on a trampoline. 

The voice of the Lord makes the oaks shake
and strips the forest bare,
and in his temple all cry, "Glory!" (verse 9, ESV)

Can you imagine trees whirling like partners in fast-paced dance, the voice of the Lord calling out the moves, leaves swirling from the trees like skirts and scarves of dancers, the rhythms and movements and exchanges beautiful in holiness.

Suddenly they are assembled in the temple. Oceans roaring, mountains playing, lightening flashing, wilderness skipping and tumbling, oak forest dancing. 

Every time God speaks, there is more life. The energy and exuberance in place and people accumulate.  And them we hear, "In his temple all cry, 'Glory'". 

If we have been paying attention, we are here with them. We are at worship in the beauty of holiness.

_______

The Spirit of God has descended on this old world of ours. It could be a grace-revealing gesture, raindrops on the window, a friend's forgiveness, a miracle conversion, a truth-telling poem, a rose in bloom. The beauty of holiness. And we have ringside seats.

​Henry James said that a writer is a person on whom nothing is ever lost. That sounds like a focused Christian identity to me: the men and women on whom nothing, at least thing that has to do with life - an everything does - is lost. 

Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. (verse 2, KJV)

Amen.