It is cold. Our fire can just keep up. It is Sunday, the same day of the week that will forever "live in infamy” but forever more in fame. It is Sunday, December the Seventh, but praise God, it is also Sunday, the Lord’s good and holy day. The Gospel marches on like a fire that always keeps up and will eventually extinguish all fires of evil that threaten cold and darkness to the human heart.
I see my lover softly float across our home, quietly moving here to there. She is slower now, and her body is aging. I see her. I watch her to see her. Her body is now 72 and fills me with such meaning of being. I see in her body all the years of our love, our births, our adventures, hikes, travels, and a physical love for God in Christ have all marked her with the times of all these; marks of decoration. It's a great longing of love for her to know how I see her as the years of us born out on her body. Truth comes in beauty, sincerely told by her as her body can only tell me; our years together scaring her into an ever-increasing elegance I see.
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| Thanksgiving evening |
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
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| My Santa's helper is in the purple. |
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
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| All but six of us. One of Zac's and Britt's babies is sick and they didn't get to come. |
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.
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?
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.
