A Long Time Ago....in Bethlehem of Judea

 

A long time ago a little babe was born of humble birth in a stable in Bethlehem.  Luke 2 retells the story in the Apostle's own words.  The Son of God had been born upon the earth.  Not every detail is known...but then not every detail needs to be.

 People dispute when it actually occurred in the calender year, they argue whether it happened in the fall, winter or spring.  We can be pretty sure it was not actually on December 25th.  They dispute how many wise men there were and when they came.  We hope for as many wise men as possible and we know they did not come at his birth but rather when he was a small child.  But still they have become iconic to the nativity scenes prevalent throughout the Christian world.  In this case I feel the spirit of the law is more important than the letter of it, as we ponder and remember that beautiful night.  It makes for a bigger birthday party with exotic gifts for the King of Kings...I am OK with the spirit of it.

We know that there were shepherds abiding in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night.  "And lo, an angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about  them: and they were sore afraid.  And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger."  The star shone brightly, the heavenly host of angels rejoiced in song.  The Shepherds quickly followed the light of that star to the baby Jesus' birthplace where, indeed,  they did find him wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

What we can be pretty sure of is that riding on a donkey in Mary's most urgent and delicate condition was not a comfortable journey and that Joseph walked beside her every step of the way.  We can imagine that both Mary and Joseph felt uneasy when her time drew nigh.  They were a long ways away from their home and family and there was no room for them in the Inn.   I might imagine there were some scary moments during that time when her time was accomplished that she should be delivered.  Joseph must have felt helpless and been praying fervently to know how to help her.

Having given birth myself, I can guess she was greatly relieved when he laid her baby in her arms.   And she shivered as her body temperature dropped as it always does after birth.  And she was cold, no matter what season.   I'd guarantee that!   She also no doubt shed some tears of joy, relief, exhaustion and at finally meeting her son with sheer amazement.   Like every new mother her first thoughts after her relief were probably in wonderment...I am a mother..... and now what?  For one thing, my heart will now live outside of my own body for the rest of my life.

As Mary held her new born child and nursed him she fell in the deepest love ever and it has not left her to this day.  And if Joseph had not been her best friend before the birth of her little baby Jesus, he most surely was from that moment on.  What a man of kindness, deep faith and unconditional love.  The sacredness of those few hours lasted and changed them both.  And the rest of us.  Forever.

They showed us all how to go forward in faith when they did not know all the details either.   They just trusted in God and went forward in complete obedience.  On that special night God The Father and Mary and Joseph bore a child.  Although Jesus was God's only begotten son in the flesh, is He not a part of every sacred triangle when a child is born?  I felt that and knew that when I bore our first child. God was most definitely a part of what happened that day.  As it changed Mary...it changed me in like manner.

Not such a long time ago, by Biblical standards, I was a young mother myself trying to create some symbols of that scared night in Bethlehem for our little family.  I took a ceramics class and made this nativity set for our family. It was all we could afford at the time.   It is not fancy or professionally done but it was done with my time and love which was all that I had.  It was around as the kids were growing up every single Christmas.

Since then we have gotten another very elegant Nativity set but most years it remains collecting dust in the box.  Every year the father of those beautiful little babes of ours says how much he loves that nativity set I made and how he hopes I will put it out this year.  So every year I do it for him.  It is the very least I can do for this wonderful, humble, obedient follower of Christ who has been a husband every bit as wonderful and kind as Mary's Joseph.

If you are like Mary I hope you praise your good "Joseph" for his faith and helpfulness and kindness and obedience to God.  If you are like Joseph  may you treat your "Mary" with loving respect and tenderness always. What you do will have a long lasting affect on those that emulate you and admire you and want to be like you someday.  We are never released from our stewardship as loving mothers or fathers.  And the most beneficial thing we can ever do for our children is to treat their other parent with all the love and respect they deserve. We as spouses and parents and children of God must keep all these things and ponder them in our hearts.  What we do and how we treat each other is significant every single day.  There are  sweet lessons to learn in this simple telling of the birth of the Savior of the World.

Remembering

Portraits of the Savior by Liz Lemon Swindle

This morning I woke up needing to write. That happens a lot but this morning I am feeling worried and discouraged and "needing" to get to the bottom of it. Do you ever just get that feeling that your worrying is getting the better of you? Do you feel helpless and hopeless and that lack of peace that wears you down? I feel that way right now.

I am so concerned about several really good friends that are suffering. Some are seriously ill, some struggling in relationships, some struggling financially, some with huge burdens that seem insurmountable. When you are close to people you feel their pain and the pain of their families too. The rippling effect touches a lot of lives because we are all in this earth life together.

As if that is not enough, then there is the worry about the world in general. It seems to be slipping into a downward spiral of endless evil and war, ridiculous politics, selfishness and greed. People are working less and feeling more entitled, decent morality and values are slipping away and becoming clouded with the notion that anything goes. Things that have always been a good part of our lives and culture are being changed and denied and violently threatened. The world says what used to be wrong is now right, what use to right is now wrong.

I have to wonder if my perceptions are a symptom of getting older. Does every generation feel this way as they come to a point in their lives where they have had enough of life's experiences to feel that earth life is going to the dogs? Even Plato felt the rising generation had it all wrong. Have I just had enough things happen in my own life now that I am feeling more empathy for those who are sick and otherwise afflicted or is it really getting so much worse?

It may be that lots of people I have known have gone through horrendous things and I have just been unaware and involved totally in my own little world. But to me it feels like it is getting a lot worse in spite of the blinders I might have had on in my younger years. Right now we know more than a half a dozen people that are seriously ill with cancer alone. That seems like a lot, doesn't it? I try to be really positive about life, but that is getting me down. Add to that those that are struggling with other illnesses, infertility, sick children, rocky relationships, aging parents, etc. etc.

So what I am trying to figure out is how I let myself get into this total worrying mode. Part of it is just love and concern for these wonderful people and wanting the world to be a better place to live. I think we all feel that way, right? We all want everything to be great all the time. No one chooses to be sick, afflicted, or other wise burdened with hard things. No one wants to feel helpless in helping others. We all have that "I want to fix this" mode of thinking in us, don't we?

God does not cause our problems but He allows them to happen so that we can grow. He allows them to happen sometimes so we can and will come to Him and and seek His comfort and help. He has given us so many tools to help us through this life, we have faith, prayer, knowledge of His plan, His love and His promise. We have the hope of His grace in our lives. We have the fellowship of our loved ones and those who follow Him. We have the comfort of our scriptures.

But sometimes when we are in the thick of this life, struggling with our own problems or someone else's, we forget who is over all. We forget it is not our stewardship to fix, we forget our worrying does not get us anywhere. We forget that our own understanding is so limited. We forget that He wants us to reach out to Him and let Him carry us. We forget how to Let Go and Let God...take care of it. Isn't this very essence of our mortal testing? We forget to ask for His will to be our will. We want it to be the other way around. So we ask incessantly for Him to do what we want Him to do. Sometimes that reminds me of how little kids ask their parents to do things that are completely unrealistic, or not for their best good. He alone knows the end from the beginning. We forget to ask Him how we can really help another. Since we cannot seem to figure it out on our own, we worry.

We need to turn back to God and let Him do His job. We need to pray more and trust more. We need to never say, "All we can do now is pray" as though it were a flimsy, last resort, kind of thing. It is the total opposite and the finest thing we can do for another. It is a privilege to pray for others and like all things God asks of us, brings us great comfort personally, as well. It is easy to have faith when all is well, but it is better to have faith when things are difficult because we grow from it.

This is how we are refined and defined over time. We don't want to struggle but we need to struggle. When just trusting Him doesn't seem like enough, we have to do it anyway. We need to stretch out our hand and let Him take it. Faith precedes every miracle.

I wonder why I often forget these things and the symptom of it is always....worry. I am glad I have been able to think this through this morning with you. I am feeling more faith already.

If only faith and spiritual things could be learned and remembered like riding a bicycle. But it is not that way. We have to keep relearning, keep searching and keep praying. My favorite scripture is "Look unto me in every thought, doubt not fear not." Fear and faith are polar opposites. God is over all and I am going to just be still and know that He is God.

Writing this has once again brought me to remember how blessed we are to have such a loving Heavenly Father and Savior who will never change, never leave us alone and never forget the prayers we say. What more do we need, really?

We, after all, are not in charge...what a relief!

The Light Switch Keeper

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the light that Christ is or can be in our lives. I love the analogy of righteousness, goodness and light being like the Son of God and the darkness being likened to bad things, wickedness and evil~all the things that lead us away from righteous living. In fact, for me it is far more than an analogy it is a startling reality. I love that the sun and the Son provide us with all that we need to sustain life, here in mortality and in the eternities. I love that we have our agency to choose between light and darkness in every situation.

Over the weekend we attended our stake conference on Sunday. We met in Oakland on Temple Hill and enjoyed great teachings from our leaders. We enjoyed the spirit we felt and the common foundation we shared with the hundreds of others in attendance. It was just so inspiring and one of the speakers discussed the dichotomy of light and darkness and how we control the light switch in our own lives. It was so in line with my thoughts recently and I loved it and how it applies to everything.

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Often times we feel victimized by the events in our lives. Once we start to feel we have no control we begin on the downward spiral into the darkness. Our agency should bring us great joy. It is true that we cannot prevent some of the 'not so wonderful' things that happen to us, but the way we choose to react is where the power of the light lies. By being reactionary we allow ourselves to be dragged down into a pit, we allow ourselves to venture into the darkness created by fear, anger, and hopelessness. By choosing faith in the Son, we feel of the warmth of his love, his reassurance that we are not alone, and his pure light. The reality is we control the light switch.

I have some good friends that lost a sister at 17 in an auto accident caused by a drunk driver. The five remaining sisters took this loss very hard and each suffered greatly. Years later one of the sisters, then the mother of six small children, was devastated when a police officer appeared at her door to inform her that her husband had been killed in an accident. My friend told me that immediately she felt that old familiar feeling of when her sister was taken so unexpectedly. She told me that the first thing she did this time was fall on her knees and plead with the Lord to help her view this with different eyes, to have the strength to carry on, etc. She testified to me how much this changed this loss of someone she loved so deeply. This experience of my friend, Karen, really changed my life and I try to always remember it.

I have thought of this example of someone who acted proactively, she reached through the darkness into the light. She controlled the light switch and made a conscience decision to choose the light. By going towards the light she was able to find the silver lining in her experiences and she successfully went on with her life being filled with faith and knowing that she was not alone. Of course she had her difficult days, but she decided to remain in the light. This gift of agency to choose that option, is as powerful as the faith that has sustained her all of these years. And I believe that faith goes much farther than just having a positive attitude. Faith allows us to literally draw on the powers of heaven.

When I face difficult challenges in my life I try to remember my friend's example, I try to go to the edge of the darkness, reach out and take the Lord's hand. I have always found it to be there. He waits there lovingly and patiently until I am ready to flip the switch and then I am filled with his light. When I look up, he reaches down and pulls me up.

Greg Olson~Artist

We each have our own switch and they all work the same way. Up is for the light and down is for the lack of it. The more we switch it on the easier it gets. The more it is on, the sweeter all of life's experiences get, even the not so wonderful ones. In the light they take on a different perspective. Bathed in the illuminating light of his love we can see the blessing of even the most wretched things. Although we don't seek out those times, when they come, if we turn the light on, we can see more clearly and learn from them.

It is a powerful reality that we do, indeed, have the choice to make decisions as to how the course of things will go for us in those exact moments. I cannot think of a single incidence when this practice does not or would not apply. No matter how overwhelming, no matter how small. Hold on to the light switch for dear life!

Sy: Tender Moments Part 1 & 2

Sy and Ilse

We are heading out of town this weekend for the funeral of a sweet man and "almost" relative. Sy was like a Dad, a close friend, and a mentor to us in many ways. He was a delightful guy in his 80s who lost his courageous battle with cancer on Sunday morning. He was the husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather to some of our dearest friends. So we are packing up to go south and be with them tomorrow for his memorial service.

Times like these always bring the sweet assurance of eternal life and forever families. It is a time of reflection, solemnity, family togetherness and deepening love. It is a time to rejoice in a life well-lived, a time of renewing spiritual strength, making course corrections where needed and setting new goals. There is nothing quite life major life events to shake things up and make us more aware. It makes us more appreciative of each day, each other and why we were sent here to this earth in the first place.

This family has been plagued with cancer almost to the breaking point. But they have remained strong and steadfast and faithful. They have been full of humility and gratitude to the Lord for the lives they have. They have been an inspiration of hope, pressing on in hard times and survival. All who have watched them live and die have learned from them.

To our dear friend, Barbara, her mom, brothers and children and grandchildren...we love you and your Dad will never be forgotten. I am sure he was greeted by Bill, Shannon, his parents to name a few. When the sun is setting here is it rising there. He was a wonderful patriarch, such a fun-loving, sweet and gentle man. May we all support each other in this loss and find peace in the promises we know to be true. He has done the hard thing...and now there is rest for a season. XOXO to all.

A collage made by his family~
Remembering Sy!

Sy, remembered for so many things; his unending service, kindness, humor, love for Ilse and his family, his working hands, his adventurous spirit, his love of backpacking, his thrift, his cookies, his love of great music and his hatred for garlic! What a beautiful tribute his sweet family paid to him.

His great-grandchildren playing
outside the chapel during lunch.

The gorgeous autumn sky that day!

Sy & Ilse's beautiful home on the mountain!

The traffic jam at the house overlooking the valley.
Our is the last car in you can just see our tail light.
It was a little disconcerting when the car slipped a little
when it was placed in park and the brake set
on the gravel at this angle. Yikes!

His family that came from far and wide
to celebrate the life of this wonderful
husband, Dad, Papa, and friend.
Double click the photo for a close up view.

A little algae covered lake right near their home~
looking quite beautiful and peaceful!
May you have a lot of that Beauty and Peace, Sweet Friends!

We'll Miss You, Sy!

P.S. Hi DeeDee!

I Don't Want to be An Alien!

This morning as I was preparing a group lesson for church I ran across this great poem that I feel is very poignant. The story goes that a very rich man was lying on his deathbed and not a single member of his family came to be at his side as he was about to leave this mortal life. A stranger was standing near and asked the man, "What have you learned during your life's sojourn?"

This was his reply,"

"I’m an alien, to the faith my mother taught me.
I’m a stranger to the God that heard my mother when she cried.
I’m an alien to the comfort that, “Now I lay me,” brought me.
To the everlasting arms that held my father when he died.
When the great world came and called me, I deserted all to follow.
Never noting in my blindness I had slipped my hand from His.
Never dreaming in my dazedness that the bubble fame is hollow.
That the wealth of gold is tinsel, as I since have learned it is.
I have spent a lifetime seeking things I spurned when I found them,
I have fought and been rewarded in many a winning cause,
But I’d give it all, fame and fortune and the pleasures that surround them,
If I only had the faith that made my mother what she was."

N. Eldon Tanner, “Constancy Amid Change,” Ensign, Nov 1979

I cannot imagine a life without faith and hope in the Savior....what a bleak choice! He is the way, the truth and the life!

Liz Lemon Swindel's beautiful art

Woman of Strength

You know how you go to special events and you hear something you really like that someone quotes? If you are lucky you get a handout with the words printed out for you to take home. Then what? For me, it kicks round the house for awhile on my desk and eventually I throw it away because you just cannot file everything that strikes a cord with you when you hear it. I have tried topical filing, stashing things in my scripture case, etc. but over the past 30 years of church membership most handouts have gone by the wayside. But along comes blogging and my problem is solved. Now when I heard something I really like~I put it here. I can share it and keep it but throw the paper away. The best of both worlds has arrived!

In March of each year our church celebrates the beginning of our women's organization, Relief Society, with a birthday dinner and program. This wonderful quote was shared by my sweet friend, Donna, and I really thought it was great. So here it is, I hope you like it too.

A Woman of Strength

"A strong woman works out everyday to keep her body in good shape...but a woman of strength kneels in prayer to keep her soul in shape.

A strong woman isn't afraid of anything...but a woman of strength shows courage in the midst of her fears. A strong woman won't let anyone get the best of her...but a woman of strength give the best of her to everyone.

A strong woman makes mistakes and avoids the same in the future...but a woman of strength realizes life's mistakes can also bring God's blessings and capitalizes on them.

A strong woman walks sure footedly...but a woman of strength knows God will catch her when she falls.

A strong woman has faith that she is strong enough for the journey...but the woman of strength has faith that it is in the journey that she will become strong."

How do you hang on to things that resonate with your spirit?

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Eat~Pray~Love--- On Happiness

This is the last installment (did I hear a sign of relief?) from this book. Four posts on it does not really indicate it is my favorite book or anything, it just had so many things I want to remember so what better place to save it than here? Just think of it as you own Cliff Notes by Design. If someone brings it up at a gathering, you will be covered! This quote comes from a time when Liz was in Bali and she learns a lot about prayer and meditation.


"I keep remembering one of my guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that is not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will leak away your innate contentment. It is easy enough to pray when you are in distress but continuing to pray when your crisis is passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

Recalling these teachings as I ride my bike so freely in the sunset through Bali, I keep making prayers that are really vows, presenting my state to God and saying,'This is what I would like to hold on to. Please help me memorize this feeling of contentment and help me always support it.' I'm putting this happiness in a bank somewhere, not merely FDIC protected, but guarded; held there as insurance against future trials in life. This is a practice I have come to call 'Diligent Joy.' I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend told me once---that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler 'n Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is therefore, not merely a self-preserving a self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people."

I really like that! I guess what has made this a good read for me is that the story is enjoyable enough but the things that it has made me think about are intriguing..from pizza to prayer she hooked me!


This is a picture I took today near our home. It was beautiful outside and it was a great day for contemplating things of the spirit. I felt very grateful for all the good things in our lives. I think that is what she meant by continuing to pray after the crisis has passed. What I feel seals happiness in our heart is gratitude to God for his continual loving kindness to us as individuals. We will see His tender mercies every single day if we just look. It is pretty hard to be grateful and unhappy at the same time. What do you think?