Heart 2 Heart

  As we prepare for Christmas, I wonder what you’re having to make room for.  Are you having to make space in a bedroom for extra guests or an extra chair or several at your table?  Are you rearranging your furniture to make room for a Christmas tree or even rearranging your outdoor planters to make room for a blow up snowman or Santa?  I wonder if you have time, or consciously make room, for pondering what Christmas is about? This year, somewhere between the tinsel and the turkey, or maybe in the days between year end and year beginning, I invite you to make room for pondering Christ Jesus.  This is after all what many Christians around the world do during Advent.  They intentionally stop and take a pause to remember that first Christmas, which reminds them that Jesus is the Christ child that gave us Christmas.  But why does it matter today, 2,000 plus years later?  I’m looking forward to Christmas 2022.  It seems so much more hopeful than r...

  H olding the hand of the O ne who saves, ... whose P ower defeated sin and grave, ... his E ternity breaks into our today, ... this HOPE does not disappoint.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been watching Downton Abbey.  I’d never seen it before and I’m thoroughly enjoying getting to know the characters and their comings and goings. This week the often acidic Dowager Countess showed one of her softer moments as she comforted her granddaughter, Edith.  Edith was lamenting that it was beginning to feel as if God didn’t want her to ever be happy.  The Countess responds with her age acquired wisdom that life is just a series of problems needing solutions.  Once a problem is solved, she says, very often another presents itself requiring a fresh solution and so on until you die.   Certainly if you’re a fan of Downton, you’ll be aware that there is no shortage of the need to creatively solve a variety of problems that both the family and their staff experience.  Accident of birth whether high, middle, or low ranking, is no protection from life’s problems. The Countess’s view may be one we identify with, whereby we use our ...