"Like Working In Santa's Workshop"

I had a great spiritual experience yesterday.  My lover and I worked at Samaritans Purse, Operation Christmas Child processing facility in Boone, N.C., where we helped to send several of the 13 million Christmas boxes to children all over the world.  Yesterday we were processing boxes that will go to Benin, Africa.  As she and I checked each box, one of the workers came by and told us, “Remember, you will be the last person to see inside these boxes until some child opens them on Christmas.  

I spent the first hour looking down into each box, crying tears of joy, tears of sadness, tears from the Holy Spirit deep within me, crying for and with the children of the world.  God tears as He longs to “suffer the little children” as they come to Him.  

I have never had a more profound Christmas experience.  As we quietly rode home in the dark and blowing snow, my lover looked over at me and said, “It was like working in Santa's workshop.”  Yes, the one in heaven.  

https://www.samaritanspurse.org/our-ministry/broadcast-occ-ads/?utm_source=Ggl&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=m_YGOC-B25V&utm_content=OCC-Bcast-Ads&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=155943035&gbraid=0AAAAAD2XO8cONHxSeJTCve6bi-lYky4Kg&gclid=CjwKCAiA3L_JBhAlEiwAlcWO5wxNzXg2H12eIBnjgzhpPTfCotoc3T2eKKDcO5nnluNFkWReXPTNwBoCLVkQAvD_BwE

My Santa's helper is in the purple.

See You In All The Familiar Places

And as I lay by my 67th Thanksgiving, I am gifted with my 67th Christmas. I find myself in all the “old familiar places”: before a fire, His Word, good coffee, a full house of love and loved ones, and a new dawn rises behind me, lighting the world in front of me.  “Oh come all ye faithful.  Joyful and triumphant. O come ye, O come ye to Bethleham.”

I hope for all of you a meaningful and sincere retracing of the Holy Trail to Bethlehem as we seek, once again, to “come and worship our newborn King” and “feel the worth of our souls.”  “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places.”  Merry Christmas

All but six of us.  One of Zac's and Britt's babies is sick
and they didn't get to come.

 

The Beginning

Thanksgiving 2025.  In many ways, it is hard to believe another one has come so quickly.  All the brevity of time.  The days are flying by…but so far my wings are holding out.  I am sustained by His “everlasting arms”, this view, my lover's daily love note, and Doris Day singing Christmas Carols that begins my giving thanks on this, my 67th Thanksgiving Day.    

 

Thanksgiving Monday

Who are we to thank for yesterday? The sky, a blue vaulted ceiling of heaven.  A quietness where you could hear a falling leaf settle to the ground.  The river, a smell of burning incense on the altar, an aroma awakening our sense of smell to the pinnacle it deserves.  It was a holy day, a Monday, a day that can gift us with imaginations of the Divine.  Oh, who casts off Divine for happenstance?  How dull would a heart and mind be if chance were the one to bow before in Thanksgiving for Monday?

  

 

Winter Pool Blessing

The Great Tennessee River is being laid by for the spring to come. She lies quiet and still, much of her girth stored for winter.  I wandered her banks yesterday, wondering where she is being put up?  Twenty feet of her shores are already laid bare and will daily decrease to winter pool.  What is left of her will nourish my heart through the coming cold winter until spring, when she will once again fill herself and lazily spread to her summer banks.  Happy Thanksgiving, Ole Girl, Mighty Tennessee, wonderful she river; hurry back.   

Our first Christmas barge.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

That’s a good way to think about how the Sabbath comes to me.  I am drained out and long for the renewal of worship and concentrated humanity, all seeking to worship.  Worship is my greatest need.  To openly lift my body, heart, and mind to acknowledge You are worthy of all my worship and praise.

It is a great cleansing of all that has weekly stained me and led me astray, of my pride and self-righteousness, and of my lack of love for my fellowman.  Of greed, sloth, and apathy.  Of a week of slowly making myself king.

But it is also a great renewing, refilling, recommitting my heart, mind, soul, and strength to You Three as King over all of me.  To clean myself inside, so I can live rightly on the outside.  To refocus my senses, sharpen them, tune them toward You Three and all that is of You.  It softens me, allows me to see and hear aright again, make me kind, and fills me with longing to love and help.  It allows me to throw my tightly fitting crown at Your feet and give life another determined attempt.  The great do-over, a new week, and oh, the glory of what a new week might hold for me!!!  Amen and Amen.  Why Me Lord?

 

An Ongoing and Ever-Changing State of Beauty

I am a student of beauty.  Beauty is everywhere, which is rewarding if you are a student of it.  My best teacher is nature.  Beauty in nature is different from how humans create beauty.  Beauty in nature is the entirety of the natural object.  It's never in a non-beautiful state.  The more it is reduced, the more beauty it reveals.  I was trying to teach this to my lover yesterday as she was admiring a shard of a seashell on my sacred table. The shard is just as beautiful as the original whole shell.  In fact, it might be more so since its very nature as a shard could imply it was lesser than.  But this is not the case.  It remains beautiful even though it has mostly been eroded away.  In this truth lies an even greater truth.  It is nature, the natural occurrence of it, which alone can reveal the beauty of that to which it is applied.  I could take the shell and, using all my tools, try to reform it into something beautiful, but even on my best day, I would never be able to reform it into something equally as beautiful as the original shell.* But nature can.  Lay the shell out in nature, allow the sea, waves, wind, and sand to apply themselves naturally to it, and they will reveal what only they can, an ongoing and ever-changing state of beauty.  This leads us to an even greater truth.  Who is designing all these occurrences of artistic genius?      

*I could perhaps carve it into something else; maybe a relief of a seascape or a pleasing form, but it would not then be a shell but something else I had made from the shell.  What nature does to it is reveal its beauty, its beauty being held in all states of its entirety as a seashell. 

The teaching shell.