Just. Home.

It's in the slow waking and unhurried first hour
of putting on the fire and knowing it will burrn
all day....

....there will be quiet and tea
and a long game of Scrabble and just
the two of us....

.... will conversate and laugh, unpressured by
calendars or clocks or phones or have-tos,
and it will be simple....

.....and sweet to rest in the simplicity and 'now-ness'
of mid-Christmas joy, setting aside for just a time the
necessary, fulfilling and competing demands
that mostly
keep me away from home. 

But.  Not.  Right.  Now.

Right now
I am fully, gleefully, gratefully present
at home.

Just home,
with a fire on.
All day.

Cosmic Improbabilities: An Open Christmas Letter to Highview Community Church

In the end, I always feel slightly bedazzled.

Doesn't matter when I get started, or how much I feel ready, in these last few days before Christmas it always surprises me that it's all happening so soon.  How could it be only 'five more sleeps' until The Day? 

But it is.  And here I am, ready and waiting, and bedazzled again by the cosmic improbability of Love Incarnated.  That's where these pre-Christmas meditations sometimes take me.  God came down?  He put on human skin? 

And to be perfectly honest, it could easily all become just a 'nice' story bordering on myth to me, if it weren't for a dynamic piece of compelling evidence that it actually did happen  -- you.

When you set aside your personal agendas...
When you take no thought of status or position...
When you're selfless and kind and compassionate....
When you persist in the mundane and refuse to run after 'sparklier' but lesser things...


When you serve tirelessly, and offer yourselves as living sacrifices...
When you open your arms and your hearts and even your homes, to make room for others on the journey...

That is when I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the King of the Universe really did wrap Himself in humanity.

Because to do so, He had to set aside any personal agendas and took no thought of status or position.  It was an act of ultimate selflessness, unbelievable kindness and infinite compassion. He arrived in such an obscure, ordinary way, refusing to be born in the palace He deserved, but offering Himself to the totality of His mission, and opening His arms to the weak, the poor, the vulnerable, the broken.

So when any group of people think, feel and behave in any of these extraordinary, cosmically improbable ways, there is mighty evidence indeed that the power of the Incarnated Christ resides among them. 

You need to know that to live and serve and be among you is a great honour for me, one I feel woefully undeserving of.  To watch God move among us in countless completely obvious and totally hidden ways, knowing that His Holy Spirit is being allowed to shape, correct and inspire us more and more into the image of His Son?  What a good and astonishing gift!

As we move closer to Christmas Day, whatever it holds for each of us personally, my prayer is that that we will make every effort to be fully present with the ones God gathers around our table, and to be acutely aware of His deep desire to be "Emmanuel" - with us - over the holidays, and in our lives always.

The New Year holds many more good and astonishing gifts, of that I am confident.  I can't wait to unwrap them with you as we continue to be a 'cosmic improbability' in our own backyard and around the world.

I love you.  I say this with everything I know in my heart to be true.

Ruth Anne

Saving the Best (and Hardest) for Last

Things have fallen into place this season, allowing me the great gift of being really ready for Christmas this year, well in advance.  Yes, I know I'm a Type A and like to be organized and all that.  But this year seems to be a year when all that administrative hutzpa I've been blessed with actually worked on Christmas!

To my delight and wonderment, the house has been festive since late November.  Cards were designed, crafted and delivered by December 1.  Family meals are planned out, and we already have the turkey and some 'sugary treats' waiting in the freezer. 

All our gifts have been unhurriedly selected and wrapped, and some of them have already been delivered.  Everything's ready. 

Almost.

Every year, no matter what degree of readiness applies to all other Christmas things, I find myself in the same place about one thing.  I do not yet have something for Ken.

I could blame it on his gender, or the fact that already has the whole set of 007 DVDs.  He's a collector, and over the years family and friends, myself included, have tapped into his interests and have, on his behalf, completed 'sets' of any number of things.  I could say it's that. 

I could say that you can only give a man so much chocolate (although I doubt he'd agree).  I could even blame it on the fact that his birthday is a mere month to the day prior to Christmas, and that I use up all my best ideas on him then.

But its not that. It's more than that.

It's the sheer impossibility of finding something that means anything at all when the person to whom you are attempting to give means more than anything else. 

Now, sometimes I do come up with a brainy idea and the depth of the giving matches the giving of the gift.  But more often I suffer this seasonal anguish, and falter in my desire to make it so. 

Because what do you give to a man who was once your teenage boyfriend, all newly mannish and  mysteriously 'other', with some enchanting, awkward kisses to offer?

And what do you give to the guy who was brave enough to marry you, and adventurous enough to start a family with you, and strong enough to build a life with you, and courageous enough to stay with you?    What do you offer a man who has muddled his way through enough of his 'stuff' to muddle with you through yours?  Who has come to understand your soul - what makes it sing, what feeds its passions, what fuels its energies - and determines in his own to be the one who finds the resources that will release you to become all you were meant to be?

What do you give the hero who cares for your elderly parents as if they were his own?  Who's stood by your side, and behind you and in front of you, when hostile forces have come against you, never flinching even in the putrid face of the enemy set on your destruction.  And then, on the other end of heroism, faithfully does the mundane with patience and humility?

What?  Pajamas?

See what I mean?

I know I'll come up with something.  I always do.  And Ken will be all good and happy about it.  He always is.  Well, most of the time he is.  But either way it won't be enough.  Not in reality.  Not at all. 

So I will try to ease the anguish of my inadequate gift through doing my very best to let him know every day how unspeakably grateful I am that I'm his wife.  Make it as public as I can.  As private as I can.

Merry Christmas Honey.  You are, without question, my best gift.

Peace Gifts

It's the simple gifts that bring me most peace
this time of year.

Being home all day Saturday.  Just.  Being.  Home.  A slow in-seeping of joy as I wrapped presents, sipped tea, ran through a few loads of laundry.  Not having to be anywhere else.  All day. 

Early, early this morning, alone at the front of the church.  Lit only by the lights on the tree.  Listening over and over again to Breath of Heaven (Eaton/Grant) and keenly aware - again - of my desperate need.  Such a gift to be so vulnerable before a terrifying God... and feel so safe.

In my office after church today.  Packing up, sitting at my desk, I felt two slender arms encircling my neck.  I hadn't heard her come in, but it was Abby.  She didn't say anything.  Didn't ask for any of the candy she knows I keep in my desk drawer.  She just hugged me.  "Everything okay?", I asked, because she was so quiet.  "Yeah," she said.  "Just wanted to come hug you." 

Finally.  Finishing.  Greek!  I've been working on an online credit since the beginning of August.  There's been computer-related challenges over and above the brain-brutality language learning is famous for.  So to reach the designated level that crossed me over the finish line made me close my eyes and fill my lungs slowly and deeply.  I held the relief in there for a little bit.  Then let it out slowly, reveling in that wonderful sense of having accomplished something important and difficult.

Receiving word that someone wants to give $1000 towards the costs of bringing our Thai friends to Canada next month!  A surprise, this.  Didn't see it coming.  

A December with space to breathe.  And plans for family gathering that lack the painful complications of other years.  Oh yes, this is truly a gift.

And it's all a gift, in the simplicity of it.  That's all.  Just quiet and beautiful and life-giving and sweet.  I receive these gifts with gratitude of magnificent proportions, inside a soul fully aware of all there is to grieve. 

Yet stubbornly, I notice the peace.  Because it's there.  Simply.