Monday Motivation: A Christmas Meditation
Quick Tip: Kid-friendly Housekeeping
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I’m taking a brief hiatus from blogging to finish another writing project that I’ve been working on over the last several months. My deadline is approaching, and it really will involve my full attention for the next couple of weeks.
When I’m back, I’ll be able to give my all to this blog, and I do have a number of post ideas teeming in my brain. I just lack the time to develop them right now.
Want a peek at what I’m working on?
Please pray for me as I finish up this work. And I’ll be back soon to tell you more about it.
Sunday morning before we left for church, I spent a few minutes looking over a my notes for a Sunday School lesson I would be teaching.
My three year old little girl—the little girl who is bouncing, running, twirling, bounding, wiggling from the moment she leaps out of bed till the moment she climbs back into it—my “Tigger-ish” little girl was sitting quite still next to me in her pink corduroy dress, white tights, and bright pink shoes. Her little legs were crossed, and she had her pink New Testament opened in her lap. She’d turn to a page and study it for a minute or two before turning to another page.
Her brother came into the living room and wanted to see if their Bibles were the same size. “Just a minute,” she said and carefully placed her ribbon bookmark in the pages of her Bible before closing it. She took his blue New Testament and matched it to hers. “Yep, they’re the same size,” and she handed his Bible back to him and re-opened her Bible to the spot she had marked. For several more minutes, she quietly sat next to me studying the pages of her pink Bible laid across her pink corduroy jumper.
It was one of those moments you want to capture and treasure forever. But it was also a moment replete with motivation. My heart swelled with the intensity of the moment, and suddenly I wanted to accomplish nothing more with my life than to shepherd that little soul safely to her Savior, to nurture her love for Him and to see her love abound, to see the words on the pages of that Bible find a place in her heart.
Every now and then, the Lord provides a focal point, a moment that centers our life and our focus for us. Look around you today and find your focal point. If you could accomplish only one thing for the Lord with your life, what would that one thing be?
Sometimes, it takes just a moment to help us remember what all the other moments are about.
The other day I had an extra frozen pizza that was just begging to be dinner. My problem was that the pizza happened to be a cheese pizza—a big hit with the kids and not so exciting for Mom and Dad.
I love getting creative with my food (which is why I’m not the best baker), and a cheese pizza is all I need to get my creative tastes brainstorming for a semi-homemade dish.
Cheese pizza with a kale and bacon topping
I left a little less than half the pizza plain, just enough to please the kids. Then I got to work on the adult portion: kale, diced onions and bell peppers, bacon bits (real, not imitation), and a little sprinkling of cheese on top. Kale is not something I normally have on hand, but I had extra after using it in my Zuppa Toscana soup recipe (think Olive Garden, yum!). The kale came out crispy, subtle, and a perfect compliment for the bacon. The pizza was absolutely delicious, probably one of my favorite combinations.
And it gave me a brilliant idea for several other variations of the semi-homemade pizza: Tuscan; chicken bacon ranch; mexican. The possibilities are endless! Best of all, I can have all the custom ingredients of homemade without any nightmares with yeast or homemade dough.
Fall is probably my favorite time of year, the cooler weather, the earthy smells, the vibrant colors. But it is difficult at times for me to reconcile that such a beautiful season is really a season of death; all around me things are dying.
My children bring this to mind most vividly as several times a week one or the other of them will come in from playing outside and ask if they can water my plants. What plants? They’re all dead! Or in the state of dying.
But then I read the verses in Isaiah 61:1-3. He gives beauty for ashes. Only the Creator, the Giver of Life, the Resurrection could turn death into something so radiantly beautiful, so picturesque. Even as nature groans under its curse, the Lord, who has subdued all things to Himself, crafts something spectacular.
What a hope for you and I! Our own curse of sin thwarts us with trials, suffering, and ultimately death. And yet even in the midst of daily misery, there is beauty. From the pains of labor come new life. From the toils of the soil come the harvest. From death in the flesh comes life in the spirit, life abundant!
Our God is good. Take a moment to see it, to breath it, to taste it—His goodness surrounds us, even during the seasons of life where His presence seems most unlikely.
I’ve heard people say it over and over again. “Boy, I can tell if I miss my devotions. I just have the worst day.” And for awhile, I misunderstood that statement to mean only people who failed to do their morning Bible reading ended up with days when everything unravels at both ends.
I remember realizing my misunderstanding for the first time. On a particular day a few years ago when everything was unraveling, I desperately prayed to God, “Why is this happening? I even had my devotions this morning!”
As soon as the words left my mouth, the pang of conviction stopped me in my prayer. I was, in a sense, blaming God for not coming through on His end of the bargain. The bargain was one that I had unknowingly established, which said God was entitled to give me a good day if I set aside time to pray and read His Word.
And I knew, in that instant, that God wasn’t entitled to give me a good day or bless my efforts or provide smooth sailing. Nothing I did could entitle God to do anything. He was the One at work in my life, and it was HIS work and HIS plan, not something I had contracted out to Him. If He decided that trying days would best conform me to His image, then my day would be nothing less than “refining.”
On the other hand, what were devotions and quiet times good for? Why was I supposed to faithfully study the Bible and pray?
I’ve come up with a short list of reasons that I have found to be true over the years.
- It clues me into God’s plan. I get a glimpse of what God is trying to accomplish in my life, and I can trust His promise that He will complete that work. As I study the Bible, I see the nature of the work He is doing and get an idea, from other characters in the Bible, how God will go about accomplishing that work in my life.
- It sustains the Spirit’s work. In temptation, the Spirit can only remind me of passages that I have read and studied. During trials, the Spirit can only comfort me with Scriptures that I am familiar with.
- It reveals the One who is at work. If nothing else, studying the Bible reveals to me the God of the Bible, the One who is at work in my life. Only through knowing Him can I have the assurance and the confidence that He is good, that He is merciful, that He is faithful, that He is the “I Am” of all that I will ever need.
Will studying God’s word daily guarantee that I’ll walk on water while everyone else is fighting storms? Not in the least. But that quiet time with God will be the outstretched arm I need when I’m sinking below the waves.
The air is getting crisper, the trees are donning their fall colors, and the leaves are starting to drift downward—all signs of the holidays for me. I take a deep breath and fill my lungs with the scent of home, family, warm meals, and memories.
We take the holidays seriously at our house. My husband is typically thinking about Thanksgiving dinner in August, and I usually have my holiday planner ready to go no later than the first of November. So October is really not too early to be thinking about holidays for us. But there’s another reason for early planning.
Traditions are treasured ingredients to every holiday, but they are also the most profound teaching tools for our families. Think for a moment of how powerful your family traditions have been to you. If mom didn’t make a dish one year, if grandma decided not to decorate, if one element was missing the holiday seemed a little less of a celebration. Our traditions, in one sense, make up the essence of our celebration; they almost become what we celebrate. Traditions are powerful, which is why they can be perfect tools for teaching and training, for focusing our families on what we are celebrating, on what is important.
Last year, I read a book by Noel Piper called Treasuring God in our Traditions, a beautifully written book (and it’s a free pdf download!) Her book highlighted all that I had felt traditions could be, both the big celebratory kind and the everyday treasures, but her philosophy behind traditions was what spoke to me the most. Just like the landmarks and memorials of the Israelites, set up throughout the land so that the children would know about the God of their fathers, traditions are meant to be those teaching moments that captivate all of our senses and emotions and weave them into the fabric of what our lives are about.
Sometimes, however, we become slaves to traditions that mean nothing to us. In fact, traditions can become the very things that cause us to dread the holidays altogether. Are we as keepers of the home and, often by default, keepers of tradition wielding the power that we have to its best purpose? Are we choosing traditions that help us and our children to reflect on the character and courage of our ancestors, on the goodness of our God, and on the purpose of our existence and our celebrations?
Let’s take a moment, before the momentum of the holidays sweeps us away, to re-evaluate what we want to celebrate and how we want to celebrate it. What do you want this Thanksgiving or this Christmas to feel like? What do you want your family to be focusing on over the next few months. What needs to be eliminated and what needs to be added to make that atmosphere comes together? And if you’re not sure where to start, read Noel’s book.
If nothing else, let’s make sure that these next few months don’t interfere with our greatest calling: to love our husbands, to love our children, and to love our God.
