Children's Author Featured at The Well

Award- winning children's author, Jane Kurtz, will be the feature speaker at a special holiday event at The Well on Saturday, December 4th from 5:30-7:00pm. Kurtz was selected by American Girl to write books for the 2010 Girl of the Year, Lanie. Raffle tickets will be available to win gift baskets and a Lanie doll by American Girl.

Kurtz is also the cofounder of Ethiopia Reads, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing literacy to Ethiopian children. The organization has opened 46 school libraries in Ethiopia and operates 5 donkey mobile libraries. The event is a benefit to raise money for the next shipment of books. You can learn more about Ethiopia reads at http://www.ethiopiareads.org/.  Other books by Jane Kurtz will also be availble for purchase and autographing. Girls, mothers and doll-lovers are invited!

Seasons (Ecc. 3:1)

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven….


There is a time to read to my children, to swoop them into my still lap and point their fingers to the letters of the alphabet, to count the ten giraffes on the page.


There is a time to sip champagne and to celebrate the romance in my life that sustains me when the trees have shed their party dresses and darkness comes early.


There is a time to fasten my knees to a stiff, cold pew and listen to the words of others.


There is a time to cook the best food I can find, to mull over the right platters, to pick the most comfortable cups.


There is a time to be a good friend, to listen, to bear others’ burdens. There is a time to speak my own problems as well.

There is a time to stand in a light and proclaim unyielding devotion, and there is a time to quietly go on my way just knowing.

There is a tiny amount of time to discover what is wrong with the world or how it could be better, and there is an expanse the size of an ocean of time to praise the Creator for this incredible world just as it is.


There is a time to learn and to cherish my favorite color, and there is a time to see no color at all.


There is a time for families to gather and to bring in their suitcases their own conflicted ideas to the place that has so carefully whittled them, a time to figure more things out over board games.


There is a time to seek warmth and there is a time to make oneself into that needed comfort.

There is a time to run as far and as fast as I can, and there is a time for walking in the shadows of a passing season.

There is a time to text, and there is a time for text.

There is a time for more food and more friends. Thankfully, almost every moment of a life can become this.

There is a time for everything, and this means there is time for everything. When the time comes for me to say that I have done everything that I can do, I know this will be a season of peace.

Have a blessed Thanksgiving.


--submitted by Kerri Snell
We at The Well want to wish each of you a wonderful Thanksgiving. We will be open our regular hours Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, but will close Thursday to spend Thanksgiving with our families.

Keep it Simple

The Lord is revealing to me that He can be a God of few words. How enticing is the difference between the Word and words… How the one just seems to encompass the others in silence, as if to say I am enough. I am all. I am.

God is explaining to me a gratitude that leaves me speechless…. A Thanksgiving meal that is more than a menu…. A gospel that is shared like breath…no rehearsal needed….. A knowing that He has a place set for me at His table, an assurance that sticks like warm, brown gravy to the ribs.

There is nothing that doesn’t dance to this music, and with this music, there isn’t a room that needs another thing.


Giving thanks is not a piling high of reasons, it’s more a letting go of the need to know those reasons in the first place. The more simply that I can experience gratitude, the lighter I will feel airborne on the flight of my life. Giving thanks is not at all the same thing as accepting the gift of gratitude. One plots the journey by tacking rote lists to the bulletin board of Heaven with sharp pins; the other breathes in the presence of God with eyes closed and arms open for what will simply come.


God is telling me to pack my suitcase lightly on my way to joy, to surround myself with less to clutter my sight. To intentionally place a precious, few objects in the curio cabinet of my soul. Whatever I need I can buy when I get there. To lessen my Thanksgiving inventory, to live more like a poem, with sparse words compressed and chosen as carefully as a child’s name…a poem where the meaning moves freely through the music of a verse without the limits imposed by unintentional words.


Thankfulness is not a spouting of reasons I should feel thankful, although that is certainly a start. But I have been doing that for over forty years now, and it’s time for some editing. Thankfulness is, for me, a letting go of words in order to walk in closer proximity to the Word, with nothing in my hands, with nothing but my empty hands, and a few precious things which I immediately drop at his feet with much relief.


I drop the need to cook the perfect turkey at His feet. I drop what is deep within the deep-fried deliciousness of that need, the need to feel connected to my own history. Instantly…no matter how the turkey turns out, I belong.


I drop the need to protect my children from any disappointments by granting them all their holiday wishes. I drop what is deep within the dollops of decorative confetti, the need to understand my own distinction…Instantly…no matter if the sweater fits or not, I am sanctified.


I drop the need to orchestrate the perfect moment, and the vacuum deep within the choreography of that dance which can only be filled by the Creator if I leave it as it was intended to be….empty.


I am finally grasping this season the difference between accomplishing a to-do list and the ingesting of the internal rhythm of a life well-lived in the light, how the one makes no time and space for joy, and how the other is teeming with it, so that joy gives life to everything and to everything else.


I am thankful.

-submitted by Kerri Snell
Come in through Thanksgiving, mention this blog and receive 25% off any fall decoration excluding Colonial Candles.

The trance of possibility

Some of us are drawn to the blank page. The possibility that an open prairie places before us when there are no mountains, no tall trees to impede the scope of vision. The freshly painted room with floor cloths still stretched across the floor…no furniture yet..no frames on the walls…the relationship when more is unknown than known. The silence in the mind just after a person has received a gift, before questions come. For some of us, beginnings are a place of peace. In Forrest Gump-ian terms, it’s the box of chocolates before the first piece of candy is removed for a taste.

If I had to stand before a tribunal somewhere to defend my faith, to stand before a jury not of my peers to “give the reason for the hope that is within me with meekness and fear,” I’d like to think my skills at debate (better known to my own mother as the propensity to argue with a stone) would elevate my status in the eyes of those in power of my immediate destiny so that if my life were in question, my life would be spared to debate another day. I’d like to think I know my Bible well enough to accurately conjugate the how-to’s of salvation, the miracles of Jesus, the main points of the Sermon on the Mount. I hope that I have prayed enough publicly that I would feel comfortable praying for my enemies and would be able to turn those beatitudes into “DO-attidudes” should push come to shove.

But, in my own life, in my own personal walk, the most poignant pointer to the fact of the resurrection which is the source of all hope in this world is the newness found in each new day, the same-ness of that newness and yet, the surprise tucked within the coating of each and every 24-hour period that causes one man to smile, another to laugh, another to cry, another to work, another to run, another to pray as though for a first time.

There’s such a comfort in knowing that at 7 a.m., I am pouring coffee into my mug just like everyone else. That children are turning one all over the planet to accompanying balloons. There is such conviction in the reality that hunger feels the same to every man, that imagination is not a respecter of children, that no matter how we vote, we close our eyes and we open them in the very same way.

 

Yet, give 100 people a blank piece of paper and a pencil and not one of us will draw the exact same picture. Not one of us will write the same poem or even remember the same points of humor in the same funny story. With God, all things are possible, before they are limited by expedience. My soul is drawn to the magnitude of that possibility. I am thirsty each day for the water that renews itself, for history that re-writes itself, for civilizations that re-build always around a premise that is as close to us as our own blood. If tomorrow becomes today, she will be brand new even though she has come to you millions of times before as a prevenient grace.

Within each day, within the sufficiency of each 24-hour period, exists the potential to know God.

-submitted by Kerri Snell