The Burnt-Over Blog: Christmas

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Christmas

We had a wonderful Christmas this year. Our congregation opted to include a Christmas Eve service and Seth helped put it together. It was of course incredible and never having attended a Christmas Eve service before, I would have to say it was great to really get in the right spirit of things.

Here we are getting ready to head to the service.

Amma's yearly pajamas for the kids.

A quick humorous story about Bekah on Christmas Eve. Seth had showed them on T.V. the Santa tracker. When Bekah saw that Santa was getting close to America he then told her that they had to go to bed or Santa wouldn't be able to come. That little girl shot into the bathroom brushed her teeth so quick and then threw down the toothbrush and running into her bedroom to go to sleep! I had to go in and tell her she still needed to go potty. She started to cry and said that she wouldn't have time because Santa was coming soon and she needed to hurry and go to sleep so he wouldn't miss her. So she did that quickly, rejected reading a book, and just closed her eyes and went to sleep! It was hilarious. If only Santa could be threatened to come every night for such an easy bedtime!

They found Melman and Marty peaking out of their stockings Christmas morning.

All the kids wanted was Toy Story toys for Christmas this year.

Due to Seth having to be gone for training as a Navy Chaplain we celebrated Lincoln and Bekah's birthday's early so Seth could be there.

2011 was a good year. Seth finished school at Vanderbilt, commissioned as a Chaplain in the Navy, and we will be headed to Japan in April for three years. Bekah has enjoyed pre-school and Lincoln got to go to a great camp for kids with disabilities over the summer. Amma and Aunt Annie got to stay with us for a little while and though the year was saddened by the loss of my mother, we did get to go and see all our family in Utah. So here is to a great 2011 and a hopeful 2012 full of changes and new adventures!

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Doctrine and Covenants 163:10a-b

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I ain't never seen 'em, but my common sense tells me the Andes is foothills, and the Alps is for children to climb! Keep good care of your hair! These here is God's finest sculpturings! And there ain't no laws for the brave ones! And there ain't no asylums for the crazy ones! And there ain't no churches, except for this right here! And there ain't no priests excepting the birds. By God, I are a mountain man, and I'll live 'til an arrow or a bullet finds me. And then I'll leave my bones on this great map of the magnificent...

The Meaning of Christ on the Cross

At the heart of divine love is sacrifice-the willingness to be diminished so that another may be increased. This is the meaning of Christ on the cross. God, who could have insulated himself from pain, descended to earth, assumed the aspect of his children, and bore the greatest pain in his own person. Rather than hoard the heavenly feast for himself, he invites beggars to his table. He breaks bread with us and drinks from the cup our lips have touched. When he speaks to us, it is no longer from a great white throne, centered in a vortex of light, surrounded by celestial griffins, warding off the unwashed. He speaks to us eye to eye, from a traitor’s gibbet, with his blood and sweat and shame upon him for all to see, and with his wounds forever open. He comes not as king, but as slave. He comes not as judge, but as accused. He comes not as patriarch, but as bastard. He comes not to punish us, but to let us punish him. He does not ask us to love him until we are first certain that he loves us. He is the great failure who saves us from our success. He is the great fool who spares us from our wisdom. He is the rejected lover who will not, in turn, reject his love. He is a prophet without honor, a citizen of a despised nation, a poor relation, an unwanted guest. He is the voice of one crying in the wilderness of every human heart. He is the God of grief and sorrow who is the joy of our desiring. He is utterly good because he loves us in our sins and imperfections, because he freely made himself equal to us, and because he freely opened the way whereby we may be made equal to him.

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Conversion is a permanent process in which very often the obstacles we meet make us lose all we had gained and start anew. The fruitfulness of our conversion depends on our openness to doing this, our spiritual childhood. All conversion implies a break. To wish to accomplish it without conflict is to deceive oneself and others: "No one is worthy of me who cares more for father or mother than for me." But it is not a question of a withdrawn and pious attitude. Our conversion process is affected by the socio-economic, political, cultural, and human environment in which it occurs. Without a change in these structures, there is no authentic conversion. We have to break with our mental categories, with the way we relate to others, with our way of identifying with the Lord, with our cultural milieu, with our social class, in other words, with all that can stand in the way of a real, profound solidarity with those who suffer, in the first place, from misery and injustice. Only thus, and not through purely interior and spiritual attitudes, will the 'new person' arise from the ashes of the 'old.'"
--Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 118

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