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Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy New Year

I have some thoughts to share with you heading into this new year 2011, and some great quotes. I think it's going to be a wonderful year, yet the unknown sometimes scares us. We want to know, and we don't. "No one knows what the next year will bring, but one thing is sure. He will be with us and He is enough" (Amy Carmichael).

Whatever losses we may have experienced already or are anxious about in our future, it's time to let go. It's always time to let go! We have a hard time with this, and so we have to do it over and over again. We can't change anything by clutching at things or people, but it doesn't stop us from trying! My favorite quote on letting go: "If you lose your reason, lose it into the hands of God. It's the only place where anything is safe" (Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water). I have often made substitutions: If you lose your children, lose them into the hands of God. If you lose your joy, lose it into the hands of God. For me, this act of letting go produces peace, as I re-orient myself once again to the fact that God can be trusted when all else cannot. There is tremendous comfort and power in letting go purposefully, letting go--not that what you love will be released untethered into the vast darkness of endless space, but rather--into the safety of God's love and wisdom and timing.

And finally: "I said to the man at the gate of the year, 'Give me a light that I may go forth into the unknown.' And the man replied, 'Put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light, safer than a known way.'" (King George)

We are on a sort of safari into the wilds of our own lives. The crucial thing is to stay close to our Guide, and follow His map. He is the one that gets us through safely. He is the one who can be trusted.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Christmas

I woke up too early this morning and couldn't go back to sleep. So I got up, and eventually was rewarded with a beautiful, quiet Christmas sunrise pinking the sky. It was my first grateful moment of the day, welcome after a very emotionally difficult Christmas Eve. As unbearable as yesterday was, knowing I would not see my daughters this Christmas, today has been peaceful. My point is that our negative feelings can be overpowering, but they aren't forever. If we can wait it out, joy is very near. There is joy to be had, in spite of grief and disaster. Reach out for it. Joy to the world.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

NEWS BULLETIN!

As Real As Apples, Brynn's new volume of poetry, will be available in 6-8 weeks at major online retailers. The story of her love affair with the Lord, the book should come out just in time for Valentine's Day!

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

What God Says

Whatever is in your past, whatever challenges or disasters have plagued you in this past year or years, as we close out 2010, stop listening to despairing thoughts and fearful refrains. Listen instead to what God says:
"But this is a people plundered and looted; they are all of them trapped in holes and hidden in prisons; they have become plunder with none to rescue, spoil with none to say,
'Restore!'"
Isa. 42:22
"But forget all that...It is nothing compared to what I am going to do.
For I am about to do something new.
See, I have already begun! Do you not see it?
I will make a pathway through the wilderness.
I will create rivers in the dry wasteland."
Isa. 43:18,19
"Nothing is impossible with God."
Lk. 1:37
Nothing!