A Christmas Miracle

It's snowing. Cinnamon raisin bread bakes in the oven behind me. N is upstairs in her crib - not sleeping, but content.

It's a rare moment to sit and reflect in the middle of holiday preparations.

When did Christmas start to mean making so many plans you meet yourself coming and going? We've got parties and presents, gatherings and goodies, cards and church. Preparation consumes days, evenings, lists, budgets.

Historically, Christmas was a mass, maybe with stockings stuffed with oranges and chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil. People didn't plan holiday schedules months in advance. Sometimes, there weren't any gifts at all. Did they not know that Christmas is about the joy of giving and family togetherness? I guess Hallmark hadn't gotten that message to them yet.

Of course, if you want a party, you could go back to that first Christmas: the actual evening Jesus was born. There weren't shiny baby announcements printed by an online printer; but there were angels announcing his birth. There wasn't a baby shower; but there were those really rich guys who came months late with a fortune - not an exaggeration - in gifts.

Something big happened. Something to trigger heaven's hosts to sing. Something that would cause people - even people who don't actually profess faith - millennia later to pause their usual lives and acknowledge a peculiarity in the day.

It wasn't family togetherness. Joseph and Mary don't seem to have been welcome with their families back in Nazareth.

It wasn't the joy of giving. Those smelly shepherds who showed up that night probably didn't leave anything behind them other than a pungent odor.

It was Emmanuel. "God with us."

What's the big deal about that?

Do you realize that every other religion on the face of the earth is an attempt by man to reach god(s)? Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam . . . even some that borrow language from Christianity and encourage their people to read the Bible, they're all a story of men striving to make themselves right. People trying to approach God through working, praying, fasting, denying themselves, traveling to holy places. They know something stands between man and God, and they do everything humanly possible to get past that or to outweigh it with "good" things so God will approve of them.

Christmas is a big deal because that is when God gave us the gift we never saw coming: He came to us.

Emmanuel.

God with us.

No more striving. No more analyzing whether we've done more good than bad. No more comparing and wondering and worrying. God reached down, became a man, so he could die. So he could rise. So he could obliterate death and sin.

Not so the good works would outweigh the bad, but so that the bad would die - poof - gone.
Not so we could get to God, but so that God could live in us.
Not so we could do good things, but so that God could act through us.
Not so we could have a good life, but so that we could live eternally.

If that's not a Christmas miracle, I don't know what is.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

John 1:9-13 ESV

My Recent Reads

I love to read books.

Fiction, non-fiction. Historic, current. Local, foreign. Give me a book with a decent storyline and an eloquent author and I can get lost for hours. Am I crabby? Let me read for a while and I'll be better. Am I bored? Usually a book can get me through. Am I happy? I'll celebrate by curling up in an easy chair with my paper-and-ink companion.

I'm not a snob about genre, but I do perhaps achieve a measure of snobbery when it comes to content. (1) I don't want cookie-cutter plotlines. If I can guess the ending in the first chapter, it's not going to hold a ton of appeal for me. (2) The characters have to be relatable: not stunningly gorgeous, impeccably witty, or astonishingly wealthy. (3) The author must, must, MUST display a reasonable command of the English language. No matter how good the story or characters, misspelled words and glaring grammatical errors are fingernails on the chalkboard of my - well, you get the idea.

So, with all that out in the open, you may better understand my delight to come across not one but two excellent reads in the last few weeks.

The first was "The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels" by Janet Soskice (Chatto & Windus, 2009). Here lives the tale of two middle-aged women in Victoria's Great Britain, a time when women didn't generally hold their own property or get degrees at universities, and a time when rationalism and Darwinism were eroding confidence in the reliability of Scripture. Agnes and Margaret, devout Presbyterians, inherit their father's entire estate (yes, making them fabulously wealthy, yet they're still human, sibling squabbles and social blunders remain unvarnished). Because they believe that their wealth is a gift from God for a specific purpose, and because they've also been gifted with a penchant for learning languages, they head to the Middle East in search of ancient biblical manuscripts. Their journey leads them to the recovery of the oldest copy of the four gospels found to that point in time. The discovery reestablished the perseverance of the integrity of the Scriptures through time and laid to rest the concern that the gospels were a collection of oral traditions compiled hundreds of years after the life of Christ.

This story drew me in and held me. My lasting impression was that of awe; God will preserve His word, keeping the secret things hidden and preserved (sometimes for centuries) until the day they are required to once again assure His faithful that, yes, His word is truth. If non-fiction as a genre tends to turn you away, please try again with this one. It reads like a novel, yet it is all delightfully true.

The second book also happened to be non-fiction. "Juniper: The Girl Who was Born Too Soon" by Kelley and Thomas French (Back Bay Books, 2017) relates the story of a woman who has always believed she would have a daughter. Though she didn't play with dolls or set up a make-believe house when she was little, she has never wavered in this conviction. When she eventually marries Thomas and they experience infertility, she pursues treatment as if her daughter is waiting for her to simply get it right so she can join their family. Through IVF, they do finally conceive, but when their daughter is born at 23 weeks gestation, they have to make some heart-rending decisions. (23 weeks is perilously close to the age of viability as accepted by many medical practitioners. Many doctors would not feel morally obligated to intervene to save a child born at this age.) They decide to let their daughter decide: as she displays a tenacious hold on life, they pursue treatment for her, spending months in the NICU at the side of her bassinet. As one thing after another goes wrong, they face the reality that they may lose her before she sees their faces (she was born before the eyelids are slit to enable them to open), before they ever hear her voice (she breathes with a ventilator because her lungs aren't fully developed), before she feels the sun on her skin.

While I was reduced to a sobbing mess at several points, the authors, who are themselves journalists, achieve a balance of hope in their retelling. Thomas begins reading the Harry Potter series to little Juniper, providing a number of heart-warming - even funny - passages. Their primary nurse begins providing little, light-hearted outfits (XXS pet costumes!) once Juniper makes it past the initial critical days.

I was awed once more by the intricacies of the creation of life. The authors, one admittedly without a faith and the other a lapsed Catholic, reflect several times on divine matters and, while blatantly liberal, a decidedly pro-life message emerges. There were even snippets that approached a devotional tone, in the Kuyperian Reformed tradition of "All truth is God's truth." Kelley writes, "On matters of faith, Tom and I had little clarity. But we were forced to ask ourselves if we had been part of a miracle. If, beyond all expectation, a God that neither of us had served well had given us a gift we did not deserve" (p. 301).

Not that this volume is squeaky clean. There's some language. The story of their relationship naturally models itself along cultural norms. Their experiences with IVF, an understandably delicate topic, are discussed frankly. Yet, for the more mature reader, I recommend "Juniper." And if you just can't bring yourself to crack open the cover of a book, you can check out a greatly abbreviated version (recorded before they decided to write their book) on RadioLab.

A Letter to a Dreamer

Dear Aspiring Home-Maker:

You're brave. Not many women today think staying at the house and making a home for your family is a big enough deal to be a dream.

Some do, but they're a little shy about declaring it.

I don't know why. Maybe they think it's a waste of a college education (as if it doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to shape the next generation). Maybe they think others will think they're lazy (but if they were lazy, it would be smarter to hire a maid). Maybe it's a hold-over from the feminist "liberation" of women that gave women the option to be anything they want to be (as long as they don't want to be a home-maker).

You'll get called a number of different things.

"Stay-at-home mom" (as if you're never going to leave the four walls).
"House wife" (who wants to be married to a house?).
"Home-maker" (lofty, but I prefer "domestic engineer"!).

You'll get a number of different responses when you answer the question, "So, what do you do?"

Thankfully, I've never encountered outright derision. I'm hoping that was left back in the 1990's. Maybe it wasn't. Not sure what I'll do if I come across it.
I have, however, gotten the ambiguous, "It's nice your husband makes enough that you can stay home." I'm not sure what to do with that, exactly. I mean, it sounds like they're implying we're wealthy; compared to Africa, most of Asia, and South America, we are, but then, so are they; compared to the average American's idea of wealthy . . . ? I've seen people with much larger houses and newer cars complain about not being able to live on one income. You can't wait until you have enough to stay at home - you have to learn to make what you have be enough. I usually end up just saying, "Yes, I'm very thankful he does."
And then there are the congratulators, the ones who give me kudos and make me feel strong and counter-cultural. But then I feel like I'm misleading them. I'm not giving up a dream and putting a career on hold for the sake of my child(ren): this is my dream. This is what I've always wanted to do. I went to college and headed for a career, and, yes, if God hadn't given me a husband just then, I would probably have my master's by now.

But that wasn't my dream. This is.

Be brave, my sisters who share this dream. Let it be your dream. Be the shining light for someone else who wishes they could dream of making a home for their family.

It's so worth it.

Sincerely,
Me
Domestic Engineer

A Death

We had a tragedy recently in our small hometown. During a thick fog, a pedestrian was struck and killed by a motorist.

What shock for the family.

I know the breath-grabbing numbness I felt when my grandma passed away suddenly on April 21st, and she a far cry from healthy. But this was a grandmother, quite healthy, who never came back from a walk around town.

But I think I really feel for that motorist.
Imagine being the cause of such tragedy.
What agonizing heartbreak.

And in such a small town, only a few thousand people, what would it mean to rebuild a life? I don't know the legal repercussions which may yet play out, but wouldn't it be nearly impossible to start again when everyone in town knows that you are that person that hit and killed so-and-so? Even if they weren't angry, even if they viewed you with pity, wouldn't you feel forever defined by that one moment of obscured vision, of inattention?

So would you move away? Would you leave town and try to start again amongst the anonymity of the crowds of a larger city? But then, wouldn't there be that looming thought over every friendship, that once it reached a certain depth, you would need to tell them about that part of your past?

I was walking along our city sidewalks and pondering this shortly after Easter. What if, I thought, the people of this lovely city were able to reach out, not in pity or in sidelong glances, but in a realization of our own sin - both of omission and commission.

What if we all realized that our sin has caused a death, too?

That little white lie? killed someone.
That snide remark? murder.
That vengeful thought? a direct cause of a death.

Whose?

The very Son of God.

1 Corinthians 13*

If I communicate in witicisms and with impeccable grammar, but have not the love to speak respectfully to my family, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I know exactly what my child wants, and understand all her moods and can read her non-verbals, and if I have all faith, so as to provide for her every need, but have not the love that listens to her soul, I am nothing. If I give away all my free time and give up my hobbies, and if I deliver up my body to stretch marks and spit up, but have not love and so complain every step of the way, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind in the tempest of an unreasonable baby; love does not envy another mom's stage of life or boast about a clean house; it is not arrogant in expectations or rude in private. It does not insist on its own way when it is clearly the "right" way; it is not irritable with the fourth wake-up call of the night or resentful of a husband who needs to sleep before going to work; it does not rejoice in self-pity, but rejoices with the truth of God's bigger picture. Love bears the weight of a child's utter dependence, believes the best when there is no reason to, keeps hope for a child's future when the world goes crazy, endures when the unendurable days come around.

Love never ends. As for cheerios on the floor, they will pass away; as for diapers, they will cease; as for baby talk, it will pass away. For we know what we're doing in part and we clean bits of the house in part, but when adulthood comes to our offspring, the scattered toys will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a woman, I gave up childish ways, but now I need to forbear with my daughter's childish ways. For now we see God's plan dimly, but then as clearly as face to face. Now I know in part what God has done for me in His love; then I shall know fully of His sacrifice and His provision, even as I have been fully known by Him during every moment of my life.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

*Mom Standard Version, as adapted from the English Standard Version

The Perks of Being a Girl

After N was born, some very kind persons gifted me with a certificate for service at a nail salon. I decided to double the fun and take my mom, so we both got mid-winter pedis last month.

Pros: it's January, so we could try a color we wouldn't normally get, because no one is going to see our feet. Plus, nothing beats the winter blues and gets you thinking summer like a pedi!
Cons: it's January, so no one is going to see our feet. Plus, once you're in the summer mood, you get to go outside to your car and it's still winter.

I loved the chance to pamper Mom and myself, since this isn't normally something I do/make the time to do. I would definitely recommend this gift idea for the new mom in your life!

And while we're on the topic, here are a few other less traditional ideas for gifts for mothers of new babies:

• Gift certificate for a massage or haircut
• Postage stamps (for all those thank you notes or baby announcements)
• Meals after 3 weeks post-partum
• Cleaning
• Promo codes for shutterfly.com or other photo sites

N charming the salon ladies