Abandon

The great word of Jesus to his disciples is “abandon.”–Oswald Chambers

Simplicity has become an attractive concept to me since I have begun to see simplicity not as the task of “keeping it simple, stupid” but as a discipline, as a journey that leaves fewer footprints in the sand even though this road

sometimes requires more steps. Simply put, the more cares of this world that I place upon my own shoulders, the less time, talents, and energy I have to devote to worship, repentance, reflection.

Last evening my family and I sat around the table discussing what our New Year’s Resolutions might be. I seldom make New Year’s Resolutions because I don’t like to verbally or mentally commit to any act that I don’t truly intend to carry out. Perfectionism often kills resolution, doesn’t it? While prayer feeds resolve…so perhaps my resolution should be to pray more, speak less.

Simplicity isn’t really a more-or-less kind of being, and this has come of late as a complete surprise to me. I find myself on the eve of this New Year’s Eve called to something I can only claim to barely understand. Here I am, writing about a concept which I can’t define, walking on the beach with an alluring shadow. It seems that I can only right now tell you what simplicity is not:


1. A gift which can be captured by declaring its antithesis….but here I go anyway.


2. Debt. Personal, financial, emotional or any other kind.


3. A mirror. I believe simplicity is a lamp…or perhaps a candle. We never get to the crux of anything by staring at our own faces. Or by blogging about it, for that matter.


4. Your parents’ legacy. Parents provide so much, but how often do we ponder the implications of teaching our children that in the living of this life, the immortal is seldom seen as important? I feel that I have trained my own children to learn this lesson the hard way.

5. A theology of bad shoes. Simplicity should not be mistaken for the wearing of frumpy sweaters or as an excuse not to attend to the details. Simplicity is more archeology than it is any other thing. Simplicity is not junk bonds or junk management.


6. Identity. My own preoccupation with the establishment of who I am supposed to be as opposed to the gentle acceptance of the flawed being that I am has created more dangerous clutter in my life than materialism, political persuasion, regional influence, or cultural adherence. There is truly only one way to fit in…and friends, it’s breathtakingly simple.


7. A movement. Or a color. Or the doings of Angelina Jolie.


There is so much more (ironic isn’t it?) that I want to tell you in this blog post about simplicity and my fascination with it. Right now, though, all I can tell you about simplicity without spilling all the beans and creating a logistical mess of what God intended to be a sculpting process…just His hands within my soul…is this….


Here I was trying to accomplish what I could never have accomplished on my own…the right to just be…like the tree in the meadow…to be a part of the restorative in His creation…to rid myself of my own violence and destruction at a level deeper than even the molecular…and He stepped in and paid the price for me….


I can spend the rest of my life, the rest of my New Year’s resolutions attempting to pay Him back, and if I choose that bent, my life is going to subsequently fill up with peripheral nonsense. My relationships are going to suffer. I am going to spend too much of my time knowing myself too well. I am going to build and acquire and walk right past the person who needs me the most in any given moment. I am going to stay incredibly busy and fit and numb.


Yet the thirst for this drink of Gospel, the yearning to be in the center of this great happening, will never leave me. Simplicity is the box that everything I have ever wanted, needed, attempted, failed at, succeeded at fits into perfectly, and simplicity is so much more beyond that box. This New Year, I resolve not set another goal or to ingest another concept, but simply to attempt the impossible made possible by God…the reckless abandon, the “great word,” the genuine acceptance of the gift which leaves me no more room.


Take no thought for your life, what you shall eat, or what you shall drink; nor yet for your body, what you shall put on.–Matthew 6:25

-this post submitted by Kerri Snell

Christmas I Don't Knows

We come to the brink of another Christmas, another December 25th, another solstice upon us. We have participated with our fellow community members in carol-singing, cookie-exchanging, card-sharing, coffee-drinking at the Well. We have watched our youngsters dress as shepherds, our video cameras capturing crude re-enactments of this event that our clocks and even our own pulses seem to be ticking toward. Our Advent calendars now have smudges and bent pages. Some of the doors are missing their peppermints. We have checked off many a Christmas ” to-do,” and we are mentally beginning to forget all that we intended to do that didn’t get done again this year.

This will be my 48th Christmas. I have glued many a paper chain. I have baked decades worth of cookies, and I can sing the first, second, and fourth verses of most Christmas hymns by heart. I have stood for many seasons, the candle in my hand, the hot wax dripping as I light the candles of those next me…my children. I can put together the breakfast casserole for Christmas morning with my eyes closed. Christmas is a collage of memories for me full of unpainted junk boards, glitter, angel wings, felt and straw…full of eggs and orange juice, rump roasts, sugar-coatings, and strong coffee….full of baby dolls and little suitcases, little feet sticking out of their pajama bottoms, puzzle pieces, pets under the tree, body parts of robot toys, electronics that can’t ever seem to save us…

I am happy, oh so happy to report, though, that amid the hum-drums, amid the par-for-the-course relatives-behaving-badly, amid the airport delays, the returns without receipt….there is so much mystery alive still for me in this middle-aged Christmas, when I am too old to delight in the snow that I must shovel, when my Christmas cheer at times needs a battery replacement, there is so much about Christmas that I still do not know, that I do not understand. Writers spend most of our time coming to grips at the expense of our reading audience with those points of life we feel we have mastered, those pieces of profoundness and sometimes profanity that we feel we’ve come to the conclusion of once and for all. Our medium, our text, is black and white. We deal in specifics. We look out our windows at a robin on the branch and we attempt to capture some sort of essence or truth about what we have seen. Writers often forget that this bird flies away to a place that is unknown to us and our little truths.


Certainly it is what I don’t know about the robin and her red breast and the tree that mesmerizes me and causes me to question, and brings that image to the forefront of my mind to write about. Certainly it is the ethereal, all the elements that don’t contain carbon, the words which whisper realities, and like the robin fly in and out and through the pages of the Bible that keep me coming back to the words on the page. It’s the feelings I can’t put into words that most convict me of the depth of love I feel for my husband and my children.


It is the resurrective qualities of Christmas that keep me holding on to the traditions that bring me closest to what I cannot adequately express and can only know from a depth that does not write or speak. The resurrective qualities of Christmas place the book of Isaiah smack in the middle of the Gospels. We can never memorize all the scripture that God has orchestrated for us to learn, that is all around us all the time. This week it was for me a little scrap-lumber manger and the hands of a little girl placing her blue leftover material across the front of the highest board, which was less than a foot high had the cradle been placed on the ground. Next Christmas, for me, there will be another image that I will not forget. It might be marshmallows floating in hot cocoa or my kids all sharing a blanket that isn’t big enough to keep one of them warm. It might be the hands of an old woman or the disjunct phone speech of my 90 year-old grandmother talking to me about projects she intends to complete in the coming year, not realizing that at her age she IS the project.


Look around with intention. God will bring His words alive and He will link your thoughts, your words, your experiences to Him, and there is really no word, no picture for this, except what He creates.


This Christmas may your hearts be filled with pictures of God’s Love.
Submitted by Kerri Snell
 
 
Come visit The Well this Christmas season! We will be open 7am to 10pm through Thursday, Dec 23rd. On Christmas Eve, we'll be open from 7am-5pm for those that think the day was made for the entirety of your Christmas shopping or those that want to spend a lazy day sipping hot drinks and enjoying the company of friends. We'll be closed Christmas day, but will open again at 7am on the 27th.

A Woman Fit for the Foot of the Cross

Nothing makes me appreciate all that mothers do in the scope of everything that is anything more than my own inertia when I have the flu. On good days, I float through my life, as most of the tasks I must accomplish are tasks I have been successfully carrying out for going on three decades now. More than any of the family members around me, I take the clean and pressed clothes in my son’s drawer (and my contribution to that reality) for granted. I don’t fret over recipes anymore…I seek out challenging ones or I put my brain on auto-pilot and cook completely sans recipe the family favorites we all settled upon years ago. Most elements of my life as a mother entered the realm of “tried and true” years ago.

As I reflect upon Mary and her vast inexperience and youth as she prepared herself on that first Advent for new motherhood, I must admit I sometimes miss the terror of the unknown, the need for a faith when I hear a newborn baby’s cry, the wonder at my own abilities to calm that cry. Yet, I am eternally in awe of all that this experience teaches me on the other side of a season of life. How much peace there is to know that I could easily care for that baby in the manger, at least in the attention to his physical and human needs.

But am I ready to be a mother at the cross? To watch a child of mine endure not needless but essential suffering? Am I prepared for this place where competition is a useless mechanism because first and last and rich and poor and best and worst just got toppled like so many heads? There is not a recipe for, not a birth order to lost, to life that must pass through death in order to flourish.


By Week Three of Advent we are sick of shopping. We are all wishing the presents would wrap themselves. Star-studded sugar cookies make us react with full knowledge of the come-down from the sugar high. Winter is getting colder and the journey is getting old. We’re like children in the back seat of the Ford Fairlane who want to cry at the notion of another round of the license-plate game. With increasing frequency we clamor for bathroom stops along the way, for snacks and water and elbow room. We really feel, deep down, that all of the mess has to be someone else’s fault. We are starting to tune out Christmas music and we are losing the ability to notice lights and Nativity scenes.


Runners know that the most difficult part of any race is the mile before the runner completely gives over to the race itself, that mile when the runner is still trying to keep time and pace by legitimizing the distance, part time-keeper, part god. For a mother, the most difficult moments of mothering are those in which we linger within the reach of the hemline of our own perfection because we, as human beings, can only hope to control that which, without the providence of God, we can create. Let’s face it, that is very little. There is very little in that which would have prepared the Baby Jesus for the cross. There is very little in that which prepares a woman for the real seasons of her own life.


There is very little about time which can be applied to timelessness…the absolute beauty of the run that doesn’t measure. The true Advent journey cannot be sequentially ordered, and perhaps this reality seeks attention in Week Three more than at any other time, when the “word of the day” from all the pulpits is supposed to be Joy. The cross and the manger have surprised me this week by becoming for me in my devotional time the same place. The same way when I held my firstborn son for the very first time, his entire life passed before my eyes and I could see what I really could not see. When I realized there were not enough drops of moments in the eye-dropper of my own skills and gifts as a woman to adequately fill up and prepare this little child. Not without supernatural forces. Not without prayer. Not without acceptance of the gift of the process, which was, in a miraculous way, also preparing me.


There is joy this week in Advent, in the face of all that I cannot do.

-submitted by Kerri Snell

Prayer for Second Week of Advent

May the coming of our Lord never be expected without anticipation. Prepare our hearts, Lord, to celebrate this singular act which changes everything for every one of us. We give thanks for the goodwill among us– for the coats given away, for the money that digs wells, for all the restorative acts of Christmas–for the miles that vanish in our hearts, for the barriers that lie down like sheep in the bed of straw that is grace.

May we take one step closer to Your Vision for our lives, and as Advent moves so musically toward us, may we run like the young boys tending their flocks toward that Star. Let Eternity start today for us in our minds as we conceive You and Your Story. Let meditation be our stillness and let unbounded enthusiasm for service to those who need us keep us joyfully exhausted, our hands busy and our hearts full.


Show us the reality of human futility, how the best of our good cannot ever save us, and how You looked upon us as new creation and wrestled with this fact. The conception of our salvation was molded by Your Hands into our faces even as You were chiseling the nothing that would become this beautiful yet dying world. Show us how the easiest of loves, the greatest of loves is only possible because of Love which came before us, then came among us, and will come again as a triumphant manifestation of any and everything that we know as Love.

Our Advent prayers are scribbles in the dark–inadequate representations of what we might say given what You have already done for us.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold the dwelling place of God is with man.” Rev. 21:3.
-Submitted by Kerri Snell

Don't forget that Saturday (December 11) is Second Saturdays for kids K-6th. Bring your kids at 9:30am for 1 1/2 hours of exploring Sweden!

Steps

No matter the direction of my journey this season, I am bound for a meeting at a manger. This is the humble event of Advent. All the lingering birds of late Autumn are singing this eventuality. All pointers are pointing toward this. Old Scripture predicts with clarity this coming that I am instinctively taking my steps toward. All music oozes with the belief; all paintings drip with cracks of this light. Eventually…Adventually….I will arrive in the deep,purple presence of a birth that recreates me…It happens season after season after season.


A green Shoot will sprout from Jesse’s stump, from his roots a budding Branch. The life-giving Spirit will hover over him, the Spirit that brings wisdom and understanding, the Spirit that gives direction and builds strength, the Spirit that instills knowledge and Fear-of-God. Isaiah 11: 1-2 (The Message).


I am reminded by this passage today how the spreading of this Hope has never been overt, only the futile attempts at squelching this Hope have been. So we may not have manger scenes in our public schools anymore and we may not have our Bible-thumping fingers on the pulse of our worldly leaders at the moment. We may never get moved to the head table close to the microphone of what is considered relevant culture. We may never obliterate the tendency of some to abbreviate the spelling of Christmas by replacing “Christ” with a scribbled cross mark tipped on its side. “Happy Holiday” as the lowest common denominator wish may be the only words we ever hear in our parking lots on our way to the mall.


I am reminded how Hope was born into such a world as this in a very quiet and nondescript way under the radar in a humble setting that made and still makes absolutely no sense to a senseless world.


Our politics will never possess the inclusiveness to bind this Hope. Our symbols will never capture the entirety of what this means. I walk toward this manger with nothing but my own inadequacies, the bread crumbs of my life discarded along the way, my personal testimony full of holes. It all falls short, doesn’t it? Even words fail, and at the point where music takes over, the praise still isn’t enough. Not the purest harmony of a choir. Not a wreath placed in honor of a soldier. Not the mass of red velvet draped across the belly of Santa. Not a deer versus sky accident. Not the crispest of silver boughs. Not even a Billy Graham prayer. We can’t wrap enough lights around the exteriors of our houses to capture the glimmer in that star.


We cannot put into power that which we have no power over.


The first step toward the manger is the recognition that there is no room in the hopelessness of man for Hope to come. I must arrive empty and agenda-less at the manger. I will miss the manger altogether if I seek another place or if I seek to make this place different.

Submitted by Kerri Snell