Preparation Day: New Year’s Edition
About Preparation Day
But you’ll welcome us with open arms
when we run for cover to you.
Let the party last all night!
Stand guard over our celebration.
You are famous, God, for welcoming God-seekers,
for decking us out in delight.
Whatever Idiotic Way We Can
I always thought I came to Jesus on May 11.
It was Mother’s Day 1975. I was eleven.
That’s what the baptismal certificate says, anyway.
The Saturday night before, I called my parents into my bedroom. They sat on either side and my scrawny legs hung off the side of my twin bed with the wadded up blankets because I didn’t then, and do not now, find much use in straightening sheets that would just mess up again. I told them I knew it was time. I cried.
I’d seen it done. You were supposed to cry.
Preparation Day: Christmas Eve Edition
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shone.
You have multiplied the nation;
you have increased its joy;
they rejoice before you
as with joy at the harvest,
as they are glad when they divide the spoil.
::
May you blink in the radiance of his light,
bask in his increase of your joy,
and rejoice with abandon at his coming.
Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones.
::
Joining Deidra for Christmas Sunday morning
Never Safe
It’s been a rough month.
There are plenty of ways that could be said, but let me just say it that way.
I’ve been out and about some the last few weeks, but without feeling like I could settle down for a cup of coffee anywhere. It’s felt more like looking through frosty windows to the amber glow of warmth, and love, and maybe just plain old holiday cheer.
While I have plenty of words, I’m not sure they’re best shared beyond the nib of my pen right now. But all the same, I’ve missed talking to you all, and listening to you talk to each other. I’ve come to really love and appreciate the exchanges that happen in the comment box here, whether rapier wit banter, or nonsense, or penetrating insight and questions.
Preparation Day: 116
About Preparation Day
What can I give back to God
for the blessings he’s poured out on me?
I’ll lift high the cup of salvation—a toast to God!
I’ll pray in the name of God;
I’ll complete what I promised God I’d do,
and I’ll do it together with his people.
When they arrive at the gates of death,
God welcomes those who love him.
(from Psalm 116, The Message)
Re-Gifting
It’s been a long week, pretty well blurred into what feels like one single, unending day. Yet, time’s been short.
My dad sent this. I thought it was worth a Christmas laugh. It’s at least as funny as this morning’s realization that I’ve consumed nearly a half gallon of well expired milk in my coffee over the course of this week.
Explains a lot.
In this spirit, I’m re-gifting a laugh to you:
Source: The Argyle Sweater by Scott Hilburn (www.gocomics.com)
Thanks all, for your prayers during difficult days at our home.
Preparation Day: “Who’s Afraid of You Now?” Edition
About Preparation Day
But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I’ll probably never fully understand. We’re not all going to die—but we are all going to be changed. You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes—it’s over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we’ll all be changed. In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal. Then the saying will come true:
Death swallowed by triumphant Life!
Who got the last word, oh, Death?
Oh, Death, who’s afraid of you now?
It was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three—sin, guilt, death—are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God!
With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don’t hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort.
(From 1 Corinthians 15, The Message)
Not Another List
I had a cold morning on the road. Thanks to a miscalculation on my drive time, I had an extra hour between appointments. I pulled off the interstate and sat in a parking lot scrolling through my Twitter feed to burn some time. I felt the familiar weight drop in my lap — that one that comes from scanning headlines promising me that I can attract a thousand readers to my blog in just weeks, order my home life, produce mature children and achieve intimacy with God, each in just five simple steps. Or three. Or sometimes six.
Simple steps multiply exponentially on the Twitter. It starts out as five, but by the time one reads them all, it’s a good 826 steps to follow.
Preparation Day: 72
About Preparation Day
Give the gift of wise rule to the king,
O God, the gift of just rule to the crown prince.
May he judge your people rightly,
be honorable to your meek and lowly.
Let the mountains give exuberant witness;
shape the hills with the contours of right living.
Please stand up for the poor,
help the children of the needy,
come down hard on the cruel tyrants.
Outlast the sun, outlive the moon—
age after age after age.
Be rainfall on cut grass,
earth-refreshing rain showers.
Let righteousness burst into blossom
and peace abound until the moon fades to nothing.
Rule from sea to sea,
from the River to the Rim.
The Sycamore Tree
Luke 19:1-10
Zacchaeus Was a Wee Little Man
Every night it was the same.
The man reclined at an empty table, leaning in to reach his earnings from the day. That’s what he called them anyway. The people who paid him, they called the piles of dull coins he amassed something else.
He dropped three into a worn pouch and slipped it back under his belt. He didn’t like to be caught short if he needed provisions on his day trips. Zacchaeus glanced up to see light from dying embers playing on the polished bellies of the spice jars that lined shelves around the room, imported from all around the East.
He made sure the window shutters were closed, then lifted a board from the floor under his chair and removed a smooth wooden box. He wiped the dirt from the top, opened the case and slid the larger pile into his savings cache, the clinking of metal against metal echoing hollow in his empty room.
He stared a while at the third pile, fingering a silver coin. This stack was smaller. Exactly one-tenth of the day’s total. With a sigh, he gulped down the last of the wine from his goblet and and stepped away from the table. Zacchaeus climbed on a stool, opened a cupboard and pulled out a large sack. He dropped the coins in, one by one, and put the pouch away, leaning his forehead onto the closed door.
Why did he bother setting these aside? The priests at the temple never accepted his portion. They called his tithe unclean, just like him, closing their hands and lips tight and looking off into the distance whenever he approached.
He went back to the fire and fumbled around for the needle and thread, cursing the tailor as he took up the hem on his one-size-fits-all robe.
Headroom
L. L. Barkat knows a thing or two about years. She spent one in her yard. I was thinking about her year-long pilgrimages, not mine, when we had a brief Twitter conversation about a recent Curator article she’d written. She explored the idea of committing to a particular journey for a year and whether such a thing is just a “stunty” gimmick or the avenue to unexpected discovery.
The question she asked me was one I’d not asked myself: Any years inviting you lately?
Preparation Day: 106
About Preparation Day
Still, when God saw the trouble they were in
and heard their cries for help,
He remembered his Covenant with them,
and, immense with love, took them by the hand.
He poured out his mercy on them
while their captors looked on, amazed.
Save us, God, our God!
Gather us back out of exile
So we can give thanks to your holy name
and join in the glory when you are praised!
Blessed be God, Israel’s God!
Bless now, bless always!
Oh! Let everyone say Amen!
Hallelujah!
– Psalm 106: 44-46, The Message
Thanksgiving
Oh, thank God—he’s so good!
His love never runs out.
All of you set free by God, tell the world!
Tell how he freed you from oppression,
Then rounded you up from all over the place,
from the four winds, from the seven seas.
Psalm 107:1-3 (The Message)
From my outpost east of town awaiting dawn this morning, telling my thanks
to God for His inexhaustible love and the blessings of this past year,
in all their crazy shapes and sizes.
And thanking all of you for encouraging me week after week
with your friendship and your presence.
May your heart swell with deepest gratitude and joy today.
A Quiet Week
In The Way of the Heart, Henri Nouwen told of traveling through a large city when it began to feel as though he were driving through a dictionary:
Wherever I looked there were words trying to take my eyes from the road. They said, “Use me, take me, buy me, drink me, smell me, touch me, kiss me, sleep with me.” In such a world who can maintain a respect for words?
Nouwen went on to suggest that the words with the most power to speak into our souls are those which come from silence. Not word upon word upon word.
Over the last long while, the journey has taken me off in search of a place I describe with two words: quiet and spacious. My soul seems quite insistent on this very thing. A quiet, spacious place. One where God is not asked to shout over the noise and where He has enough room to move.
It’s not that He can’t be found anywhere else — He can be found wherever He likes.
But it’s where I’m finding Him best.
And these days, I really need to find Him.
::
I’ll be practicing that silence here for the next handful of days, letting some space open and asking Him to speak from the stillness.
This week I’ll not add to the dictionary you drive through.
I invite you to savor the quiet.
::
The more talk, the less truth;
the wise measure their words.
::
Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Way of the Heart:
Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry.
New York: Seabury, 1981. Print.
Preparation Day: 112
About Preparation Day
Praise the LORD!
Blessed is the man who fears the LORD,
who greatly delights in his commandments!
His offspring will be mighty in the land;
the generation of the upright will be blessed.
Wealth and riches are in his house,
and his righteousness endures forever.
Light dawns in the darkness for the upright;
he is gracious, merciful, and righteous.
It is well with the man who deals generously and lends;
who conducts his affairs with justice.
On Silence, Nouwen
It is a good discipline to wonder in each new situation if people wouldn’t be better served by our silence than our words.
But having acknowledged this, a more important message from the desert is that silence is above all a quality of the heart that can stay with us even in our conversation with others. It is a portable cell we carry with us where ever we go.
From it we speak to those in need and to it we return after our words have born fruit.
–Henri Nouwen
::
Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry. New York: Seabury, 1981. Print.
When Jesus Creeps You Out
John 6
He didn’t bill the hillside seminar as a Lunch ‘n Learn, but when the crowd approached at mealtime, he divided up rations sufficient for just a small boy into portions enough to feed around 5,000 folks and still send doggy bags home with the twelve.
The people let full bellies do their thinking, and thought then to make the Miracle Man their king.
He slipped away to the hills before they could get a good grip on His robes.
::
Preparation Day: 90
About Preparation Day
A Prayer of Moses, Man of God
God, it seems you’ve been our home forever;
long before the mountains were born,
Long before you brought earth itself to birth,
from “once upon a time” to “kingdom come”—you are God.
So don’t return us to mud, saying,
“Back to where you came from!”
Patience! You’ve got all the time in the world—whether
a thousand years or a day, it’s all the same to you.
Are we no more to you than a wispy dream,
no more than a blade of grass
That springs up gloriously with the rising sun
and is cut down without a second thought?
Your anger is far and away too much for us;
we’re at the end of our rope.
You keep track of all our sins; every misdeed
since we were children is entered in your books.
All we can remember is that frown on your face.
Is that all we’re ever going to get?
We live for seventy years or so
(with luck we might make it to eighty),
And what do we have to show for it? Trouble.
Toil and trouble and a marker in the graveyard.
Who can make sense of such rage,
such anger against the very ones who fear you?
Oh! Teach us to live well!
Teach us to live wisely and well!
Come back, God—how long do we have to wait?—
and treat your servants with kindness for a change.
Surprise us with love at daybreak;
then we’ll skip and dance all the day long.
Make up for the bad times with some good times;
we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime.
Let your servants see what you’re best at—
the ways you rule and bless your children.
And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us,
confirming the work that we do.
Oh, yes. Affirm the work that we do!
::
Psalm 90, The Message Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson
Efficiencies
I dug for my phone under the army green flap of my back pocket. Shaking in the cold, my thumb skipped across the screen and missed the Answer button the first time.
Lyla! Are you walking in the ditch?
Knee-deep in sharp brown grass anxious to poke out of South Dakota snow, I looked up at the blacktop above me and had no answer but a sheepish “Umm. Yes.”
A former colleague had driven past moments before on that same asphalt ribbon and spotted me there in the rearview mirror. She wanted to make sure all was well. “Why are you walking in the ditch?” she asked.
Again, I had only one answer: Roadside therapy.
The Things I Don’t Know
Why had no one ever pointed out those brilliant instances of literary intercalation in Mark? Why had I never heard about Athanasius? Why had I never recited the Nicene Creed? How could I have attended church for two decades and never learned about the Babylonian exile? (Andrew Byers, Faith Without Illusions: Following Jesus as a Cynic-Saint)
I laughed and answered out loud as I underlined the writer’s lament at discovering, upon his arrival at seminary, the many, many things he did not know.
Come on, Byers. What rock had you been living under? I learned about the Babylonian exile in Sunday School.
But the Nicene Creed? I did not encounter it until college. And even then I wasn’t sure I was permitted to recite it. I discovered Athanasius just last year, though he played a crucial role in the history of Christendom, standing contra mundum some seventeen hundred years ago to defend the truth of Christ’s deity and incarnation when its very core was up for grabs.
And the Gospel of Mark’s literary intercalations? That one I had to look up the other day.
Just to find out what the word even meant.
Preparation Day: 67
1May God be gracious to us and bless us
and make his face to shine upon us,
Selah
2that your way may be known on earth,
your saving power among all nations.
3 Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!
4Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,
for you judge the peoples with equity
and guide the nations upon earth.
Selah
5 Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!
6The earth has yielded its increase;
God, our God, shall bless us.
7God shall bless us;
let all the ends of the earth fear him!
Psalm 67 (ESV)
Opening Space
My living room sofa is wearing out. I’ve spent a little time with it lately and so I notice more when I get up that I’m leaving an imprint behind in the earthy plaid cushion. It could bother me, if it didn’t make itself so welcoming. Sort of like saying, “Look here, I’ve saved a seat for you.”
When I pull up a blanket on a cool fall afternoon and settle in with a book, the hollow of the foam and springs folds around me and I think how a davenport can seem made for me, the way it fits just right.
The long read — being still for an hour or more — it’s something I seem to have forgotten in a feckless habit of turning a few pages at the end of the day or between appointments, just filling in the gaps. But in taking the long draws I find the time required to enter the space between the pages, to separate the voices from the noise.
I’ve forgotten how important the space is.
Preparation Day: 50
The God of gods—it’s God!—speaks out, shouts, “Earth!”
welcomes the sun in the east,
farewells the disappearing sun in the west.
From the dazzle of Zion,
God blazes into view.
Our God makes his entrance,
he’s not shy in his coming.
Starbursts of fireworks precede him.
He summons heaven and earth as a jury,
he’s taking his people to court:
“Round up my saints who swore
on the Bible their loyalty to me.”
The whole cosmos attests to the fairness of this court,
that here God is judge.
“Are you listening, dear people? I’m getting ready to speak;
Israel, I’m about ready to bring you to trial.
This is God, your God,
speaking to you.
I don’t find fault with your acts of worship,
the frequent burnt sacrifices you offer.
But why should I want your blue-ribbon bull,
or more and more goats from your herds?
Every creature in the forest is mine,
the wild animals on all the mountains.
I know every mountain bird by name;
the scampering field mice are my friends.
If I get hungry, do you think I’d tell you?
All creation and its bounty are mine.
Do you think I feast on venison?
or drink draughts of goats’ blood?
Spread for me a banquet of praise,
serve High God a feast of kept promises,
And call for help when you’re in trouble—
I’ll help you, and you’ll honor me.”
from Psalm 50, The Message
Time Sensitive
Guest post by Paul Willingham
It has been almost a year since my wife and I returned from an extended vacation on the West Coast, traveling by AMTRAK, Enterprise Rental and US Air, visiting with family and friends along the way. Our return to Minnesota on the first Saturday in November required us to set our watches back to Central Time Zone. Later that same evening we took part in that annual fall ritual of resetting our clocks back to Central Standard Time.
Each year in early November, most Americans reset their clocks, either before bedtime on Saturday night or early Sunday morning when they arise for the day. I doubt if very many stay up until the official government mandated witching hour of 2:00 am to reset their clocks. Cell phones and computers fortunately reset automatically.
The Conversation