MMXII...

So as the new year approaches, I've been thinking about resolutions. Where is my life now and where do I want it to go this year? That's a loaded question for someone who could end up in one of about eight different places next year. But that's a whole other blogpost...

Looking back over the last year, I'm truly amazed at how God has worked in my life - all the things He's taught me and all the ways He's changed me. It's really wonderful to see just how involved God is in my life. Sometimes I don't realize the ways He's growing me until they've already happened, and sometimes I see it as it's going on, but either way, it really is just incredible, and I just feel like I cannot say that enough. :')

Anyway, back to the resolutions...one thing that's really been on my mind lately is the need to have a thankful heart.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 says: "Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."

So I guess that's what I'm feeling the need to pursue this year. And so I'm planning on doing what DAVO has dubbed "1000 things to be thankful for in 2012"... I'm going to take time every single day to write (in a yet-to-be-purchased fabulous new journal) what I'm thankful for. My goal is to do about 5 things a day, although 1000 would only take 2-3 a day, so there's some flexibility there. Over the past several years especially, I've loved writing down ways God has been faithful (through journaling or blogging or whatever else), because it's so absolutely wonderful to look back on those things later, especially in times of great struggle. That said, I'm really excited to spend an entire year recording all the ways in which God provides for me. Plus this ties into two HUGE themes that God has brought up again and again in my life for a long time now - manna and remembering.

Well, it's almost 3 AM and I'm tired and don't have much more to say, except that anyone reading this should join me in finding "1000 things to be thankful for in 2012"! I'm so absolutely looking forward to God teaching me through this and I'll definitely be posting some of the things I'm thankful for throughout the year! :)

Buechner + Christmas

So since it's pretty much been the year of Buechner for me, I figured I'd post some Buechner quotes on Christmas tonight...enjoy! :)

"The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it."

"Back then to the essential message of Christmas which is Emmanuel, God with us, and to the questions it raises: Who is this God and how is he with us? "The high and lofty One who inhabits eternity" is the answer to the first. The One who is with us is the One whom none can look upon because the space-and-time human mind can no more comprehend fully the spaceless, timeless Reality of the One than the eyes of the blind can comprehend light. The One who is with us is the One who has made himself known at most only partially and dimly through the pantomime of nature and history and the eloquent but always garbled utterance of prophets, saints, and mystics."

"It seems to me one of the miracles of the Christian faith is that the feast of Christmas survives what we have done to it -- all the hoopla, clap-trap, commercialism and all the rest of it that I don't even need to go into because everybody knows what it is. Yet, somehow it does survive. This extraordinary moment when the whole year slows down and you point to this unimaginable event where God somehow became made flesh. It is so cataclysmic; it is so extraordinary; we try to make it habitable; we try to make it cozy; we make creches and we sing Christmas carols. At best, it can be touching and real. At its worst it can be cheap and banal. What often occurs to me about Christmas is that if it is really true, if the word really became flesh, if the mystery behind all that really took the form of a human life, this vulnerable, tiny human life whose skull you could have crushed with one hand, then there must have been extraordinary anguish and intergalactic struggle to have this extraordinary thing come to pass. It wasn't an easy thing to happen. There is a kind of terror about Christmas, a kind of holiness and awesomeness about Christmas that we tend to forget. The resurrection and the life came down and tasted the bitterness of death."

"Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed—as a matter of cold, hard fact—all its cracked up to be, then eve at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God… who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.”

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast."

Thoughts from a blissful Sabbath...

First off, let me just say, I love the Sabbath. I haven't kept it perfectly all my life, but I think it's one of the (sooooooo many) things God's been teaching me over the last few years, and I think it is absolutely one of the most beautiful gifts God has given us (if we would actually let Him).

In Mark 2:27, Jesus says "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath."

In other words, God knows how much we need to Sabbath even more than we do. And so He gave us the command to REST. I know some people who don't shop or clean or run errands or anything on the Sabbath, and I don't usually treat it quite that way (sometimes those can be hugely worshipful activities for me...but that's a different story)... But regardless of what people do or don't do on the Sabbath, I think it's so incredibly important to use it as a day of rest from the things you need rest from, and it's glorious when you do.

I came across this quote probably five years ago, and it's always stuck with me:

"To put it another way, the rest God instituted was meant first and foremost to cause us to interpret our work, to press meaning into it, to make sure we know to whom it is properly dedicated."

I think this is such a good way to think about it. I know personally, when I get so busy with classes and teaching and grading (and applications, lately), I start to lose my sense of meaning. I trudge through daily life as if with blinders on, only able to see well enough to put one foot in front of the other, not aware of my surroundings, just struggling to survive. And this just isn't how God meant for us to live!

So every seven days, God sits me down, takes off the blinders, gently lifts my head up, opens my eyes, and invites me to glory in the bigger picture, to be refreshed by Him, to be reminded of the greater purpose in everything I've been doing all week. He invites me to BE, and not to DO. And it's amazing. I didn't really Sabbath intentionally for like the first twenty years of my life. Going into senior year at Wheaton, I was about to apply to grad schools, and knew from experience how crazy that could make a person, so I decided to be very intentional with my Sabbath. I'm sure I didn't do it perfectly, but it was a beautiful experience, and I know that God used it to help me to trust Him with my future and to not completely lose my mind.

This year (after a summer of working far too many Sunday brunches), I decided to do the same thing for basically the same reasons, and once again it's been beautiful, and I look forward so greatly to the Sabbath. I'll admit, in some ways, it's a little bit stressful, because at the back of my mind, there is a little voice telling me about all the stuff I should be doing. But the more I Sabbath, the quieter that voice is, because I know I'm not even going to give myself that option. And it's so freeing! The other six days, I always feel the pressure of this world and like I should be doing work constantly. Then the Sabbath comes and I know that I don't have to do, but only to be, and that's amazingly refreshing.

I've spent a lot of Sabbaths lately listening to sermons from my three favorite churches/pastors (Redeemer Presbyterian/Tim Keller, Red Rocks/Chad Bruegman and Shawn Johnson, and Mars Hill/Mark Driscoll), listening/worshiping/dancing to music (so much Gungor :) ), reading, talking to friends, leading the high school girls' Bible study, helping out with youth group, and just resting. God has used all these to just fill me up spiritually and revive my soul in exactly the way I need after it has been battered and worn out week after week. Without these days of refreshment and revitalization, honestly, I don't know how I'd be surviving this semester. And God absolutely uses them to re-fill me with joy even in the midst of all the stress and difficulty and bad circumstances that come into my life.

That's about all I have to say right now, except for...thank You Abba for the Sabbath! :')