My friend, Debi Alexander, included this in her Christmas letter. I found it so thought-provoking that I asked her permission to repost it here. Thank you, Debi. What would happen if I couldn’t talk for nine months? How much could God say to me if I weren’t so busy organizing? What would that look like in my life? I look at Zechariah. Where he was. Where he ended up after his stint of silence. They seem to be two very different places.
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No one had told her Mozambique would be hot at Christmas. Not this hot. Sweat ran down between her breasts to pool in her bra. She opened the oven door to check the turkey they had brought from Swaziland and a burst of heat scorched her face. She brushed back her damp bangs and slathered the bird with melted butter. There must be a place for the stuffing. It was her mother’s recipe, brought from a land where Christmas meant snow covered pines and afternoons at the sledding hill. It sounds like the title of an avaunt-guard play--Waiting for the Snow. As I recall the play, they are still waiting in the end. Most years we have a white Christmas here in the Northland. But this year it looks unlikely. Before Thanksgiving we got a few inches that have long since melted. This week we had rain--rivers of it. A few degrees colder and we would have gotten exactly what we are hoping for this week before Christmas--a foot of snow. Instead we have wet, soggy leaves on the forest floor and drab gray skies. The dusting yesterday was enough for slippery roads, not enough for a snowman. So I decided to pull out some pictures of former years. Let's start with a disclaimer: Robin Jones Gunn is one of my favorite people. I met her at a Litt-World conference in Brazil. She has a HUGE heart for women and girls. Robin began writing when the girls in her Sunday school class had nothing decent to read. She recommended some books that they loved, but when they had read those, there was nothing more to give them. So she wrote her own, taking the chapters week-by-week to her class for the girls to critique. Moralist Therapeutic Deism—the religion of this age. There is a God, and he wants us to be nice and to feel good about ourselves. True, but what a watered down version of faith! It’s a far cry from “Be holy as I am holy!” This is not the religion of the apostles or martyrs, nor of medieval saints or the reformers. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism would never have driven the Pilgrims to the rocky shores of New England, or sent anyone to the Gulag Archipelago for defying an atheistic empire. |
AuthorLeAnne Hardy has lived in six countries on four continents. Her books come out of her cross-cultural experiences and her passion to use story to convey spiritual truths in a form that will permeate lives. Add http://www.leannehardy.net/1/feed to your RSS feed.
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