Monday, December 27, 2010

A 5-year-old's monologue

My Suzy doesn't realize she's recording, so she thinks her camera clicks are snapping pictures.
 

Thursday, December 23, 2010

The Sadness of Christmas

As a kid, I looked forward to Christmas with the best of 'em. 3 huge gift receivings awaited me each year, and I would be getting most everything I wished for, plus some pleasant surprises, too. In my mind, Christmas was the time to get set. All my problems, from acne to holey underwear, from boredom to nerdy clothes were on their way out the door. Satisfaction was just around the corner. Jesus had come, Santa was coming, and life would be better.

Looking back on those days, I recognize a recurring theme of sadness that crept to my heart in opening gifts. I would realize as I stacked the final presents onto my impressive mound that I was not, in fact satisfied. Even with my super-cool new Reebok windsuit, my Kirby Puckett rookie card (pictured), my silk shirt and my Steven Curtis Chapman CDs, I was still Brian. I would haul my wares happily to my room, admire them Gollum-like, and then feel the sadness come on.

As I got older I came to understand the sadness as greed's melody. So I reacted by trying to forget my own presents. I'd try not to think about what I might get, or to focus on others' happiness. As I failed in this effort, the sadness would come again, but with guilt as its dissonant accompanist. In opening presents, I found a limit to the fulfillment I longed for on Christmas day, and this in itself left an emptiness.

But it wasn't just the giving times that left a hollow. It was the fun with grandparents and cousins that I longed for all year that had to come to an end. It was the last game of bumper pool or Carroms. It was the race to see which cousin would get the last of Grandma Stipp's chocolate covered peanut-butter cracker sandwiches, or my Grandma Flint sneaking me a  few coconut and cream cheese snowballs for the ride home. As joyous and peaceful as these days were, they came to an end. And I remember feeling something more than sadness that comes when things don't go one's way. It was grief that seemed to always come with Christmas's end.

I think I know why.

As an adult, by celebrating the week's before Christmas during Advent, I have come to understand that Christmas day is only one part of the holiday. The whole Advent season celebrates the day of His first coming, but also points to Christ's return as the time when the world will finally be judged and put to rights; the time when my own greed would be gone, when the surrounding of profound love and safety would not end. We look forward during this time to Chirst's second advent, which means looking past today, dreaming of a new reality. He will come again, but He has not yet.

I believe there is a grief and longing native to this Holiday and even to our religion.  All is not celebration and praising. While the greed, the guilt and the loneliness that little boys and girls will feel this weekend will someday be wiped away, while the beautiful vision cast for us in Revelation 21, when he finally crushes once and for the forces that leave us empty is to come, it has not yet. And for that we have only to look forward. 

So when the sadness comes these days, I urge you to take it in stride. Look beyond the day to the future God has promised.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

The Christmas Wars

I like this article's perspective on "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays." It says that pressuring people who don't believe in Christ to use His name may be at the very heart of what it means to take the Lord's name in vain. Yet another suggestion from Evangelicals for Social Action's E-pistle.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

On the way to Montgomery

We’re driving down the country headed to Motgomery, Alabama to see our friends, the Jecks. We’re going in a way that runs against many of our ideals. Instead of taking the trip slow and drinking our country in with long drafts, we’re zipping along. We’re sticking to the unnatural and boring interstates opposed to the beautiful, intriguing countryside. Right now, in fact, we’re in Louisville, just 30 minutes from Wendell Berry’s Port Royal, Kentucky, a place whose beauty and significance I have read and thought much about. But we’re not stoppin’ to see, baby.  Not this trip. We’re blazing right past at 70 miles an hour. Instead of packing meals or getting supplies at small-time grocery stores we ate at a Dairy Queen and got coffees at McDonalds. Our Days Inn is within earshot of the zooming cars of I-65.

At some point, our interests and the kids’ needs come into competition. Here on this trip, their needs win. We find that as much as we need to live out what we believe, our kids have greater and more urgent pulls on our energy. They desperately need our training – a big job that takes all our attention. Suzy needs to feel protected and to be heard by her mommy and daddy. Eli needs to learn that apologizing first and then biting his brother just doesn’t fly. Isaac needs to hear when told to change his undies, “I already changed them once this week” isn’t an acceptable stance. And Leeli needs to stop every few hours for her mama’s milk, which means that the trip is long enough even on the interstates.

So instead of beholding the beauty outside our van, we’re focusing on the beauty within it. And there’s is a beauty as breathtaking as any we’re passing. And it is ours to nourish. 

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Christmas music suggestions

The existence of the Christian music industry boggles my mind. Not that Christians shouldn’t be making music, or singing about the Lord. We always have, and should. But what we find on the radio, benefiting from the industry, has been a poor imitation of secular pop music since I’ve been old enough to compare the two. The following are examples of good music that celebrates the coming of the Christ. Its singers’ discipleship is an inspiration to me moreso that their musicianship, which is also quite good.

1. Sara Groves is giving away copies of a live Christmas show she did in a women’s prison here in Illinois. This live album is good not for its sound quality but for the statement she is making by giving the concert in the first place. When my kids asked whose were the voices singing along with Sara, it was a joy to answer them, and let the joy-filled voices of women who did God-knows-what fall our ears together. Singing of Christ’s hope with inmates. That is both a proclamation and an enactment of the Kingdom.

2. Andy Gullahorn and Jill Phillips are a husband and wife team, and their first album together is called "Christmas," the unoriginality of which sounds like a sad conclusion to a marital argument to me. The album is good, but their rendition of "Nations that Long in Darkness Walked" is great. It adds a bridge that shows how this old hymn captures the central  message of the gospel, and the Christian's Advent longing.

“Nations That Long In Darkness Walked” by Andy Gullahorn



3. Randall Goodgame made a very fun kids' Christmas album, A Slugs and Bugs Christmas to accompany his and Andrew Peterson's Slugs and Bugs and Lullabies. Very good stuff. On the song the Happy Birthday Jesus, the "lump in my throat," is what I hope my own kids get as they realize all the hubbub is about the most important event in history.





4. And if you've never heard Peterson's Behold the Lamb of God: The True Tall Tale of the Coming of the Christ, it's the best. And you can hear the whole album here.
 
Items 2-4 can be purchased at the Rabbit Room Store, which I (obviously) frequent.