I look around my cozy little kitchen and am surrounded by more crafting supplies than the whole of Hobby Lobby contains. I bought them out of wreath forms. My kitchen table is covered in tins to hold homemade hot chocolate mix. I rotate knitting projects while I work through piles of DVDs (I wish I had the concentration to read and knit at the same time). All I need is a partridge in a pear tree and I’m set!

Needless to say, this handmade venture of mine explains my patchy blog silence the past week or so. Forgive me?

For today, as I wait for iTunes to finish updating so I can blast Christmas tunes and recommence my Christmas elf duties, I will leave you with this wonderful proclamation from our old friend, Walter Brueggemann:

“It will finally be about God and His faithfulness that vetoes our faithlessness.”
- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

Pomegranates are one of my favorite fruits, simply because they are so beautiful. Their bright little seeds are like tiny jewels; I told my friend Frank once that I felt like a hummingbird when I ate them. He laughed and Tweeted about it. Anyway, the point is I adore pomegranates and I truly believe that they never cease to fancy up any moment of the day.

Indeed, I often stop while cooking and take photos of my food.

As a prelude to another night of knitting, I concocted a little dessert for myself that was not only healthy but incredibly delicious. So, of course, I want to share it with you all:

Apple Compote with Yogurt and Pomegranate Seeds

1 apple (I used McIntosh, because it’s what I had)
1/2 tsp. butter
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. raw honey
1/2 c. organic vanilla yogurt (plain would also be fine, I just happened to have vanilla)
1 small handful pomegranate seeds

Core and chop the apple into small chunks. Heat a skillet on medium-low heat and melt the butter. Add the apples, cinnamon and honey, stirring together. Cook until the apples are soft and falling apart, but not mushy. Divide the apple mixture onto two small plates (or bowls) and top with 1/4 c. yogurt each and sprinkle with pomegranate seeds. Eat immediately and make lots of “Mmmmm!”-ing noises. (It’s that good.)

The finished product.

…….

In a segue only assisted by alliteration, peace is also on my mind tonight. As Advent flows into its second week, the Bethlehem candle of peace is lit, reminding us that the coming Christ bears many names, among them the Prince of Peace.

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

-Isaiah 9:6, NIV

I have been dealing with more than the usual amount of anxiety in this season of my life. Amongst all the joy that fills my days, I also have moments where I have had trouble breathing and moments where I need to be curled up into a tight ball on my bed, collapsed in prayer. I wouldn’t say it’s depression or sadness, only an anxiety that seems to cast an equally weighty cloud. In this time of peace, I find myself being much more grateful this year than I ever have been before that the Prince of Peace is coming.

The Advent service at Mars Hill last night placed this particular piece of truth in my hands and I have been thinking of it deeply ever since: “You won’t know what healing looks like until it happens.” I so badly want to know what will happen next. I want to plan and control my healing so that it’s neat and fits nicely into my checklist. I want to swoop my pen across the box next to “healed” so that my life may move forward. What I forget so often is that life moves forward regardless of me giving it permission. Even in my anxiety, it is and has been moving all this time.

I am continually learning that healing is a process and a journey, not a product or an end result. I do not achieve healing but rather it grows within me, spreading and filling in the gaps and broken places until one day, I look down and realize that I’m whole again. In this space of grace and peace, God is asking me to rest and wait, two things I am learning to do over and over. In His infinite patience, He has revealed to me that even this “anxious anticipation” in itself is a gift. This season that I find myself in, when I can so easily crash into despair, He is pulling me closer. I need these moments with Him because He understands the me that I don’t even realize I am. While I am still getting to know myself, He knows me intimately and beautifully, the way only an artist could know a painting or a mother her child. This season is teaching me I am not creator but creation.

Peace to you this week, friends. (And try the recipe.)

……………………

One recent cozy afternoon, lulled into submission by gingerbread pancakes and the lure of Hobby Lobby’s excellent sales, I temporarily lost my mind and proclaimed, “I”m going to hand-make all my Christmas gifts this year!”

I heard myself say it, felt juiced about it momentarily and then realized, about 3 seconds later, that my skills are limited to knitting scarves and cooking.

Pretty much everyone in my family has received a scarf from me at some point.
How am I supposed to wrap up a batch of my beloved enchiladas for someone?

Crap.

Well, as they say, I knitted this bed and now I have to sleep in it. So I am going one leap over the Handmade Pledge above and am hand-making every darn Christmas present. This means that I have been frequenting Hobby Lobby and getting very inspired by really cute artsy blogs like this one and this one. It gives me confidence that I too can be saucy and creative.

STATUS: Two scarfs down, umpteen more various items to go.

So tonight, I made my staple favorite dinner (black beans and rice) and have spent the past hour watching knitting tutorials on YouTube (I will master a Stockinette stitch before I go to sleep!…maybe). The first one I tried was a blur, the woman knitted so flippin’ fast I couldn’t follow anything. The second was better and offered much slower examples. I tried not to laugh at the “Hey, knitting is hip and hoppin’ for teens, look, even some confused-looking teenage boys are doin’ it!” tone of the video. Now, popping around to different tutorials, I realize that, in my six years of knitting very mediocre scarves, I have been casting on stitches the wrong way the whole time. That explains why the one end of my scarves is always sort of scraggly and pathetic-looking. Amazing what I learn at the temple of YouTube.

So here are some examples of my handmade items so far:

A yarn wreath that was super-simple, took maybe an hour or two and cost less than $10 to make!

Scarves!

Super-cute tins that will soon hold homemade hot chocolate mix.

The Beatles just popped up in iTunes, reminding me of a simple piece of advice: “Let it be.” I take this to mean if any of these projects fall apart and I find myself on the verge of weeping or drinking too much wine, just let it be. Let my scarves be imperfect or my hot chocolate mix clump up. Christmas will still happen and be wonderful; Advent will still bring the light of Christ and remind me I am loved.

So let it be…let it be a handmade Christmas for us all! (Or at least those as bonkers as me.)
Fa-la-la-la-la.

As the season of Advent folds open before me, I take a deep breath and begin the intentional process of giving myself permission to long for God in a way that is transforming, vulnerable and celebratory.

The first candle of Advent, the purple candle of prophecy and hope, promises me two things: that He is indeed coming and that He is indeed already here.

For me this year, Advent means many things. It is causing me to feel in intentional verbs that point me towards the birth of One who loves me and came for me.

Initiate.

Anticipate.

Participate.

Wait.

Welcome.

Allow.

Inaugurate.

Open.

Breathe.

Be.

Long.

The story that Christ told with His arrival into our broken human world is being told again and again in my life. He is telling me that I matter. He is telling me that I am enough. He is telling me that I am not alone. He is telling me that He’s forgiven me. He is telling me that He loves me.

What is Christ speaking into your Advent season this year?

I decorated my Christmas tree tonight. It is always a sentimental experience for me, unwrapping old ornaments and finding mementos of years past. To add another layer of sentiment, this is the first time I have ever decorated my tree alone. I just spent an hour carefully unwrapping at least one ornament from each year of my life; it was strange not to turn to my mom or sister and exclaim, “Remember this?” Instead, I quietly listened to Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas album, drank a glass of red wine, and littered the floor with layers of tissue paper.

This is how you decorate a tree that is several feet taller than you.

I love the velvety feeling of really old tissue paper that has been wrapped and re-wrapped around ornaments over and over again. As I rub the worn fibers between my fingers, I listen carefully to the stories each ornament is telling me.

This dolphin in a Santa hat was from the year we went to Florida and I was going through a major dolphin phase.

This snowman was from the year that my mother bought practically everything from a craft fair and I got really weird-looking, fake Barbie clothes for Christmas that I pretended to like. (Ken’s shirt had multi-colored sailboats on it. Even for the ’90s, it was pretty bad.)

This beret was from the year we went to Paris and my mother hand-stitched “Paris 2001″ onto it so I wouldn’t forget.

The gingerbread girl holding a tray of cookies is my favorite; I got it the year I was four years old and the little cookie sheet always makes me hungry.

This bunny looks like Peter Rabbit and was from my first Christmas.

This cheerleading bear was from my senior year in high school and was a gift from the kids I babysat. The little girl and I would jump on their trampoline and I would teach her “cheerleading kicks.” I heard today that she’s in high school and has pom-pons of her own now. I suddenly felt very old.

The reindeer ornament makes me think of the years when I would construct a sleigh out of a shoebox and attach my stuffed reindeer to it, then hang it from the ceiling in my room with string. I would lace multi-colored lights everywhere and lay in bed, covers pulled to my chin, watching the lights blink on and off late into the night.

The finished product!

It’s like reliving my whole life, lifting each year, one by one, out of a dusty tin canister. I am able to gaze my tree and remember trips I took, phases I went through and feelings that are only evoked by the holidays. I wish so desperately to be a child again while enjoying making small traditions of my own as an adult. I’ve often wondered why Christmas feels different each year than it did in the past. Has it become more commercial? Have I become more commercial? Was it because I didn’t hang up that Advent calendar that my grandma gave me when we moved to Michigan? Was it because we don’t make that certain kind of cookie anymore?

Probably not. I don’t believe the season has changed all that much. I am just seeing it through different eyes. The past is gilded with idealism and distance; maybe in reality it was never as magical as I remembered it. And that’s okay.

“In offering symbols, the prophet has two tasks. One is to mine the memory of this people and educate them to use the tools of hope. The other is to recognize how singularly words, speech, language, and phrase shape consciousness and define reality. The prophet is the one who, by use of these tools of hope, contradicts the presumed world of kings, showing both [the people and the king] that the presumed world does not square with the facts and that we have been taught a lie and have believed it because the people with the hardware and the printing press told us it was that way. And so the offering of symbols  is a job not for a timid clerk who simply shares the inventory  but for people who know something different and are prepared, out of their own anguish and amazement, to know that the closed world of managed reality is false.”

-Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination [p.64]

This runs very closely alongside the teaching from Mars Hill this past week. Skye Jethani taught and, aside from having one of the coolest names I’ve heard in a long time, he combed through the verses in Matthew 5 about “an eye for an eye” and brought out new nuances and strains in those words that I hadn’t thought of before.

There is a much, much larger story that God is telling and in this story, we are not left alone. Rather, we are invited to experience God through the person of Jesus to such an extent that it alters how we see the world. This experience that births belief emboldens, not asks, us to walk the second mile, to give our shirt to the one who steals our coat and, above all, keep telling beautiful, compassionate, resurrected stories because we know that they are more true than any others. In our ‘anguish and amazement,’ we know there are no other stories worth telling. We invoke these stories as the symbols that outlast time because we know that exile is always temporary and that as He did for the Israelites, so God is bringing us, even now, even this very moment, out of exile and into His hope.

The gist of the message was that if we truly believe that we live in a God-soaked world, a world in which God is constantly and in all ways with us, then we are assured that there is no safer world in which we could live. This doesn’t discount the danger and evil that still stir within the four corners of the world (and even within our own hearts); it simply doesn’t give that darkness the last word. If God’s last word is justice, then injustice is fleeting. Should it be fought? Absolutely. As I read what Brueggemann wrote tonight, it is proclaimed necessary to take up the symbols of hope and insist that the ‘managed reality is false.’ But we fight this reality because we know it is weak and must crumble and fall.

It comes down to this: do you listen to the stories of those with the hardware and printing press, or do you listen to the story of Jesus? Your choice dictates the world in which you live. For myself, I will choose the story of Jesus. I know no other story worth choosing; I know no other reality worth living in.

“The LORD is my light and my salvation—
whom shall I fear?
The LORD is the stronghold of my life—
of whom shall I be afraid?”
-Psalm 27:1

[Written November 10, 2009]

Tonight, at House Church, Lori brought up the idea of potential energy. She said that she looked at my life right now and saw it just bursting and straining with potential energy. Our whole group began discussing the differences between potential and kinetic energy, like any of us really had any clue what we were talking about. None of us are physicists yet we looked at each other with quizzical looks as if to say, “Are you SURE that’s what it means?” None of us really know but we venture a guess anyway, which is mostly what counts.

I said that potential energy is the energy that lives in tension and immediately, that clicked something inside my head. I grabbed scrap paper and scribbled it down, bouncing it mentally from hand to hand, like playing “Hot Potato, Hot Potato.” Like when you pull back a slingshot, the potential energy is sewn into the threads of the strap in which the stone is being stretched. In that fabric, in that material, that is where potential energy lives. How much does that also apply to people. When we are stretched, when we find ourselves immersed and flailing around in the tensions in our lives, that is when we find our potential energy. We have such tremendous opportunity to utilize that potential energy, to direct it into something that will produce kinetic energy, or motion. Each day, in every action, between the choice of doing and not doing, saying or not saying, stepping or not stepping, risking or not risking – it is a choice between potential and kinetic. We can gather our potential energy and turn into something that moves and changes us. Or we can let it gather until, eventually and inevitably, it explodes in some ridiculous way that wastes all that potential.

Where am I holding potential energy?

I think when I start writing and feel like each word is a tiny extension of myself, yet not, stretched out onto the keyboard, taunt and tense and wriggling and alive – I believe that is my answer.

This tiny girl makes me an utter fool for her. I sit there for hours, playing with her fingers and toes, kissing her soft little forehead, and talking to her in goofy voices that I usually reserve for puppies. I watch her sleep like it’s a feature film that I’ve waited years to see. Something as simple as choosing a shirt for her to wear becomes more exciting than when I picked out a prom dress.

Oh, how in love I am.
Being an aunt is nothing like I expected; it’s way, way better.

I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

-Philippians 1: 3-6

This is possibly one of my favorite passages in the Bible. For some reason, it has always felt the most like me. When I picture Paul exulting the people of Philippi, earnestly loving and rejoicing with them, I feel it is one of the small ways in which I can relate to this Biblical giant. Paul can, at times, frustrate me because he pushes so hard. I read his letters and just want to throw my hands in the air and yell, “Okay, okay, fine, you’re right! But jeez, I’m only human, Paul, okay? I’m not Wonder Woman!” (All this imaginary dialogue, while a bit zany, is therapeutic for me — Paul may push, but he also teaches me to push back. I’ve always been feisty, but the encouragement helps — even when it comes from a long-dead Biblical figure.)

Anyway, back to the passage at hand! I love the affirmation of these words — I’m definitely one for affirmation, both in giving and receiving, and it resonates deeply with me for the letter to start off that way. But tonight, as I listened to my newly acquired audio version of the TNIV (thanks Ed Dobson and Zondervan!), the phrase that struck me the most was this: “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.”

Whatever your “good work” is, carrying it alone can be an awfully burdensome thing. Struggling to be enough and do enough within the framework of the kingdom of God is utterly exhausting and in moments like these, there is nothing stronger to fall back on than these words. These words remind me that I am not alone, and I never have been. I have never been the only one stubbornly trucking along in all this mess and no matter what I’m throwing myself into, it all finds its roots in Jesus. He is the one who began this good work in me, and He is the one who will finish it. I have never been going at this thing by myself. This doesn’t make me a puppet or He the master of the strings; it simply identifies Him as the source for all the strength, the guts, the determination and the willfulness that it takes to keep pushing this good work on.

REMINDER TO SELF: We were never supposed to do this by ourselves. We never could do it by ourselves. God designed it that way on purpose.

I don’t think anything else I’ve ever read or heard or seen has summed up what I am going through right now better than this prayer, written by Thomas Merton, and know widely as ‘The Merton Prayer’:

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton, “Thoughts in Solitude”