Christmas 2021

inkspot

inkspot

Beloved Disciple
Royal Guard
Emeritus
It is an age since I was here -- all the little people who populated TDL when I was on regularly are grown up and some have kids of their own! But perhaps we can attract new folks with some new threads, or perhaps old friends will check in and get their littles interested in posting? And what better place to jump back in than Christmas -- it's just a couple days away.

{And explains I guess why I have time to take a deep breath and maybe post in here more! Work is winding down for the holidays.)

So what is everyone doing for Xmas? Last year during the plague, our grown-up girls could not come home, so my hubs and I had a very quiet celebration after a mostly boring year. But this year, this year the kiddos had their tickets home ... until our son-in-law tested positive for covid. He is vaxxed and had a booster, and his symptoms are mild ... but that means our little one can't travel! We'll be happy to have our elder girl home, if only for a few days. She just started a new job, so she is coming on Xmas Eve and will be headed back to her home on Dec 27 ... but we are thankful for any time with her! We will be a sad party without the youngest, but at least we're all well. My husband fries a turkey for our Xmas Eve dinner, and we have a big breakfast together on Xmas morning.

Then I have a whole week off from work. So looking forward to it!

What's everyone else doing?

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Wood Nymph and I are in a church choir. Three hours before my posting this, we were in rehearsal for the Christmas Eve service. Tomorrow, I am scheduled to give my final Santa Claus performance of the season. Concurrently, we are taking care of a sick cat who belongs to a SERIOUSLY sick woman we know. The woman's name is Ardis, and prayers for her are most welcome.

For persons new to this forum: I definitely do NOT advise you to reveal your true names here, but MY true name is Joseph Richard Ravitts, with a long A in the last name, and I am a seventy-year-old U.S. Navy veteran.
 
Wow, you are busy CF! Hope you have time to relax and enjoy the season at some point. Bless you for taking care of Ardis and her cat! Definitely will be praying for her.
 
Damn, this post makes me hate time passing the way it does.
Well, as we try to move past that sad realization, Merry Christmas to my fellow Narnia-heads, I am thankful that I found a community to talk Narnia with, which was something I was truly lacking when I undertook the job of reading and watching the series.
 
Suppose I were a sneaky cult founder, and I wanted to rewrite the message of the Gospels, but I didn't want to appear to be denying or distorting anything in the Bible. I would need to lie by omission, calling my audience's attention only to portions which could be made to LOOK AS IF they supported my heresy.

As I believe Benjamin Franklin said, half the truth makes a great lie.

If I wanted to flatter people that they weren't sinful and didn't need salvation, I would inevitably want to prevent them from reading anything Jesus Himself said about ATONEMENT. Jesus did of course teach about kindness and peace and love; so, if we LEAVE OUT everything about atonement and God's judgment, an uninformed audience can easily infer that the Gospel authors assumed that we were all NATURALLY INCLINED to practice kindness, peace and love. But if you learn everything Jesus is recorded as telling people (such as "--and men loved darkness rather than light"), you have to admit that Jesus DIDN'T come to cheer us on in a good way of life that we were already pursuing.

Every time anyone says that Jesus "came to teach," that speaker is at best putting the secondary thing in the primary position. Compared with His sacrificial death on the cross, all the teaching Jesus did in His earthly life was merely incidental-- true and right, but still ever so very secondary. ANYONE who has knowledge can potentially teach it to other people, but NOT everyone could carry the weight of all sin.

Because Christmas is not Easter, most of what we hear in the Advent and Christmas seasons is about niceness. But any instructed Christian realizes that the subject of atonement and salvation is the center of everything, EVEN IF it isn't mentioned at Christmas parties.
 
I am ramping down from an intense couple of weeks of mountaintop field work, just in time for wintertime to hit us hard. In the process of this, I signed three TV stations on the air for the first time, including two in my back yard! This is the culmination of about six months' work to install the antennas, power, rack, signal conduits, proof out the equipment etc. to make it all work. I also assisted a local Christian station who had lost power to their site and had generator issues. The mountaintop they were on had lost power when a powerful windstorm had snapped 8 power poles off like tothpicks. The local electric utility was having a dickens of a time getting a crew up to the top pf the snow covered mountain to replace the poles. I was also able to stave off the sale of everything I had in storage, but in exchange, I have to remove it ASAP, and I have no place to put it. This will be hard because nothing I have is lightweight ;) So for once, I could actually slow down a bit for Christmas. COVID has changed the church going experience for Christmas, but I was able to attend two Christmas eve services (I regrettably had to miss the first service of a brand new church just starting in my area) The first service, at a church where a good friend of mine is organist, was very good, and ended up with everyone outside singing carols. The second service I wasn't sure I should go to because of a snowstorm moving in. But I went and-- wow! This church I attend in part because they have the third largest pipe organ in Nevada, and they took advantage of the Pandemic 'break' to do long-needed improvements to their sanctuary. It was an full-out Episcopal High Mass with incense, ceremony and lots of really good music. (I find meaning in some of the ceremony, which a lot of people probably miss.) But it was the sermon that caught me off-guard. It was like the congergation got up and left, and the minister was preaching just to me! I also realized that the seat I had chose, in a sonic 'sweet spot' for the organ (I am a serious organ music/technology nut!) was also exactly on-axis with the pulpit, which magnified the impact of the message. The sermon addressed EXACTLY where I am at. It hinted that there may be more disruptive, transformative change coming for me, even when I have had fully enough of that in the last three years. Above all, it was a wake-up call to listen to what God is trying to say to me. I left the church distressed a little, but highly elated. And for a few magic minutes as I drove home, I experienced the redemptive magic of Christmas in a way I hadn't in many years!

Christmas day turned out to be rather strange. Very early in the morning, I watched the flawless launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. A good friend of mine called me on the phone, and we talked for 5 1/2 hours. I enjoyed 1.5 pounds of good steak for Christmas dinner, and enjoyed various Christmas music sources. Most notably, the friend I talked to has just started programming a low power FM station in Marysville, CA. I listened by streaming, and we have been comparing program notes all evening as he worked to try and come up with a good Christmas playlist. In the course of the day, we got several inches of snow in a gentle snowfall, which would have been idyllic if I had needed to go anywhere. But it kept things peaceful and quiet here, and it is a blessing any time I don't have to hear traffic noise from a nearby freeway. And of course, the lions next door would roar from time to time. God bless my lion friends! (I will probably spend some time at the zoo tomorrow, and wish I could afford more steak for my big cat friends. The lions especially teach me more about love and Godliness than just about anything else!)
 
The holiday season is always a good time to see how others choose to look at it. If church is good for anything it certainly is bringing people together in a safe, happy environment. At least, so far as I can tell.
 
One other good thing about church is reflected in Proverbs 13:20, which says, "He who walks with wise men becomes wise." None of us individually has all the answers; and NOT ALL of God's communication to us occurs in a vertical tight-beam transmission, straight down from Him to us. He often uses other mortals to enlighten us on this or that subject; and we may also have OUR turn to explain some truth to a fellow mortal.
 
Christmas E manger + Rowe.jpeg(art by my daughter from years ago)

The starkness of the season due to pandemic protocols and the painful losses so many around me have encountered, makes the wonder of >>Emmanuel/Christ with us/the hope of glory<< so much more poignant. Creating Time with Others --either in person or via virtual hangouts -- becomes more precious: getting takeout to eat with company in our backyard (sweater weather, but picnicking is still possible), or small get-togethers, or making/taking food to others...

We always celebrate Advent December 1-25 with a devotional that focuses on a different prophecy or picture of the promised Messiah each day with lots of carols and skits and readings, but this was the first year my husband and I did it as empty nesters (until our daughter returned for Christmas break). The familiar readings and songs kept us focused on True Christmas, so the season has been especially peaceful and meaningful for me... Of course we saved the most complicated skits (Redeemer/Ruth, and Resurrection/Jonah) for after she was home though.

The Wisconsin Chamber Choir's "Out of Darkness: Light" has been my favorite concert this year (which I streamed because it was out of state for me). The theme of light versus darkness, and the hope of darkness turning to the dawn, reinforces not only the true heart of Christ's Advent, but it also resonates with our world's current challenging struggles.
Here is the link for streaming:
https://www.wisconsinchamberchoir.org/out-of-darkness-light
And yes I admit I am biased toward favoring this choir because my son sings bass in it!
 
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During the early months of the 2020 lockdown, teenagers and children in my neighborhood found a gut-level way to connect. At sunset each evening for several weeks, they would come out into their back yards...... and HOWL with all their might like wolves.

Your humble servant Copperfox, painfully aware that health problems FAR WORSE than Covid were being intentionally ignored in favor of All Covid All The Time (I personally was left without my vitally-necessary blood pressure medications for a long time because of it) joined in the evening howls enthusiastically.
 
So nice to see all the Christmas reports! Thanks, friends. I got busy with the break from work and chores around the house, so I didn't get back here to wish you all merry Christmas!

Our celebration was short and sweet, so no complaints. Our younger girl caught the COVID from her husband, despite their trying to social distance in their home ... so now she is still quarantined! I pray by NEXT Christmas, this pandemic is just a memory!
 
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