Rockin' The New Year!

I have loved the holidays this year...and I love that they are over. There is something so fresh and shiny and hopeful about the New Year, and 2010 is no exception. This being the first Monday of this fresh decade, I found it fitting to get it going right.


Then, it got itself going right. Shortly after I awoke, it began to snow. Beautiful, delicate flurries that danced first one way, and then another, as the frigid breezes shifted outside my window. No accumulation - just loveliness. My youngest went to his educational cooperative classes, so I had the day to myself to work and plan. I selected an acoustical guitar CD for the Bose and put it on "repeat", creating a tranquil sound palette that blended perfectly with the day's mood and flurried-ambiance.



About half way through, I stood, taking a break and sipping hot coffee and looking out my kitchen window at a dozen sweet songbirds filling the bare branches of my tree. I couldn't have staged a better scene for my thoughts to gather around.


There we were today, Tim and I - just we two. We had been working separately, but together, in the same house all day long. Neither of us idle for a moment, neither of us bored in the least. (He worked from his home office today.) There were not many words exchanged, but not because we are distant. The house was full of a delicious quiet. We were both working on our own Vital Thing, each aware of the other's presence, each content with the other's presence. A full-some sense. A good day.


I thought of all of you, and how to communicate the sweetness of these things...so I did what I usually do. I reached for my point and shoot digital, and began to frame the images and look for the words.

The dining room table became my desk for the day.

My Tim, at his desk.

Our lunch...(oh, if you knew how rare these
quiet afternoons are for us, you'd indulge me
even beyond this! For you, dear reader, are kind...)

I discovered the prettiest 3X5 spiral index cards with

decorative edges, upon which to write out the new

daily schedule...hopefully dividing up all my repeating work into six manageable units. I'll let you know how it goes. Every day has lots of purpose, shall we say?

A ten hour day, basically...and I still haven't gotten to my blog-tech research. I'll do that as soon as I hit...

...publish post.

I Do Aspire

To live content with small means....
To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion....
To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich....
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly....
To listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart....
To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never....
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common...this is to be my symphony.

~written by William Henry Channing, but wholeheartedly embraced by yours truly.

Never has there been so much in my life to love. I have come closer in this season to living the life I've dreamed of, than ever before. Most importantly, the voice of God and the touch of God upon my life grows, "unbidden and unconcious", and radiates great joy into my so-called ordinary day. I find myself wild with joy while parking the car, singing God's praises, my heart full of creative ideas. This is all quite spiritual, yet largely unbidden - the Spirit just shows up, the presence of God manifests to my heart, heaven blows me a kiss, and an ordinary day becomes an encore of the miraculous.

"This is to be my Symphony..."

Creating Reality from Inspiration...

My youngest twin daughter gets married this March. We're in the planning stages. It is the barest of beginnings, but we've officially gone from abstract to concrete. We've looked at photograph after photograph, design after design (oh, the miracle of internet!), inspiration after inspiration...and now, we've actually picked up a few things to get us started.

the Color Story! "Soft metals", i.e. vintage golds, pewters, pops of merlot, the colors of mercury glass and pearls, combined with earthy brown woods and leathers.



A Theme. There isn't a lush profusion of blooms in mid-March, but there are bare branches, and there are birds. Birds hold a special place in the story of the new couple. They sort of fell in love, or more in love, more-or-less, because of a bluebird. Jonathan, and particularly his father, are serious bird watchers.

I can't believe it is January 2nd. Time's-a-wastin'. Daughter number two will be married in 11 short weeks.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Your God is up to a new thing. This means, it is time to change your mind!

When I say the word "repent", many conjure up images of sackcloth and ashes, and I don't discount that. But repentance is simply a change of thinking. You held to one opinion yesterday - and today, you change your mind to match what God's opinion is.

Psalm 55:19 says this: "...Because they do not change, Therefore they do not fear God."

I have known women who draw inaccurate conclusions, and proceed to stamp them in concrete. They refuse to examine a new conclusion. They are inflexible, and looking back, I don't remember a single time - not one - when they ever said a meaningful "I'm sorry" and I cannot recall them ever changing their mind once they'd formed a personal opinion.

Friends, we were born wrong. We are wrong so often, it is downright scary. To be a woman who rarely changes her mind is to be a woman who has no fear of God. That sends shivers down my spine.

Sure, it is unhealthy to be double minded. To put your trust in an unfaithful person ("given to change" the King James puts it) is unwise. But I hope to be found in Him as one who will change her mind quickly and easily. I want a tender heart. I've seen womanly hearts that should be pliable and sensitive be in reality as cold and unbending as old leather. I've been that way myself - and frankly nothing frightens me more.

New Things have inherent in them the seeds of change. Some of us need to yield to a radical change of thinking.Let this New Year be your time to embrace the New that God is always doing.

Random Musings...

Another New Year's Eve.

2009 was a mixture of "the best of times, the worst of times". I'm a better woman for having experienced the extremes. Poised to open the door to 2010, this door is quite beautiful in my imagination. It is barely cracked open, welcoming the future. It is a vintage door with peeling paint, unpretentious, and unlike any door you could find in a design catalog or on the internet or hanging on the front of any McMansion...

...something like this, but my New Year's door is surrounded by urns of the most fragrant flowers, and all this beauty hints as to what lies beyond this door - a fresh, new year. My friend Joe Ewen says, "get ready for the double portion."

Yes, and amen. Goodbye, old...hello, new!

Can't leave 2009 behind without sharing a few more images of Christmas at Our Cottage:

fragrance...great for all of the winter season! (a few slices of orange, some cinnamon sticks, some whole cloves, simmer in water. Done.)

Just a few of our cherished Christmas cards received...need more creative ideas on how to display them next year!

A gift that arrived, via post, from dear friends...

newly-weds and almost-weds, playing a board game Christmas Day...

The beginnings of our Christmas Eve snack table...(see the Red Velvet Cake? I was inordinately proud of it. From scratch, it was!)

The origins of said Red Velvet Cake...

Well. My Tennessee Volunteers have just begun their bowl game, so it is time for me to sign off. Thank you for coming along with me, on a very bumpy but very satisfying 2009 ride. I wish you good health, increased joy, some of what money can buy, and every sort of riches money cannot buy in your 2010.

Let's venture forth and make the very, very most of it, shall we?

I Long to Know My Need More Fully!

"Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our need, a joy in total dependence. We become 'jolly beggars'."

C.S. Lewis

...he said, and I quote...

Nothing we have heard at Harvest Church over the course of the entire year of 2009 is new. But a few felt it was somehow new - that Tim made it up himself (accessing that massive stash of sunglasses and Kool-Aid he keeps in his office). This reveals only the fact that the pure gospel has been so little preached in our generation. Most of us have grown up on a spiritual diet of topical this, that, and the other thing; all of it good, none of it the best. And it shows.

Not a bit of the controversy we've experienced is new, either. John Wesley, a die hard proponent of methodical good works and "Christian perfection" (and much of whose thoughts and writing I respect and enjoy) was regarded by many a solid, well educated man of God as being unbalanced and uninformed. "Jolly beggar", Wesley was not. Wesley "scurrilously" (to use an exact word from an original source document - a letter to Wesley himself from a man whom Wesley misrepresented) misunderstood and misrepresented the doctrines of Calvanism and grace. Wesley ended up parting company with several very good men who loved him.

Sad.

The saddest thing is that I can prove to you that Wesley himself was confused, and at times deeply contradicted himself. He owns up to what he himself calls a "conversion" which took place after years of his own human effort to serve Christ. The passion and peace that passes human understanding of a few Moravians stole his heart, and brought him to a better understanding of the true Christian foundation of faith. Wesley in his own words often reveals mistaken ideas of Christian "perfection". Yet he longed, himself, to be what C.S. Lewis later called "...a jolly beggar".
Nevertheless, let no one diminish Wesley's remarkable contribution to the faith! Simply do not read his writing until you have had a firm foundation of the gospel of Christ laid in your life, and you will gain much from him.

I've known these things for years and years - it is to my regret that I didn't teach them sooner. (Yeah...a true disciple takes responsibility for her own actions, or lack thereof.)

Here are a couple of quotes from one of Wesley's contemporaries (and a man who himself had foibles and faults. Hmmmmm. What do you make of that??) ~

"I will venture to assert that not one grain of Arminianism ever attended a saint [with him] into heaven... They may be compared to Paul, when he went from Jerusalem to Damascus, and the grace of God struck him down: he fell a free-willer; but he rose a free-gracer."

"The Pelagian hopes to get to heaven by a moral life and a good use of his natural powers. The Arminian by a jumble of grace and free-will, humus works, and the merits of Christ. The Deist by an interested observance of the social virtues. Thus merit-mongers, of every denomination, agree in making any thing the basis of their hope, rather than that foundation which God's own hand hath laid in Zion. But what saith Scripture? It avers, again and again, that Jesus alone is our hope: to the exclusion of all others, and to the utter annihilation of human deservings."


- Augustus Montague Toplady

Anyone who would part company with a friend, with a brother or sister in Christ, calling them a heretic or a cult or anything long those lines, over these same old issues that Wesley, Toplady, Whitfield, and others argued over...well, that person has not been well taught in church history. The one who does not know history is doomed to repeat its mistakes. It need never be so.