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

Go Ahead…Unplug the Christmas Machine…

I am the new, updated cordless version of the Christmas Machine. I run on a hidden battery the size of plankton which stores more information on it than Santa’s scroll and has the capacity to power a small country for many a Christmas future. Go ahead…try to shut me off.

When I told my husband recently that my Tuesday morning bookclub (which meets at the Well) is discussing the very timely book titled “Unplug the Christmas Machine,” he looked at me over his bifocals, shook his head like he does when his football team is behind 40 to nothing and mumbled, “It’s hopeless, honey, that will never work.” Those were his exact words except for the honey part, but we’ve been married for 27 years, so I have permission from Mrs. Clause to embellish this time of year. Did I mention that I have direct permission to embellish from Mrs. Clause?

Somewhere there is a twelve-step program for those of us who just can’t get enough of Christmas. Those of us who, when asked to list our favorite Christmas tradition need more time than it takes for a men’s chorus to sing “Twelve Days of Christmas” in a round while foraging the woods for the perfect pine tree singing into walkie talkies. Eyes glaze over as I describe buying ornaments for the kids each year, putting books away for my future grandchildren, setting up my Nativity set collection all over the house, making so much fudge the weight of the sugared fancies causes the foundation of my house to second guess itself. I exaggerate as well as embellish…not sure I have permission from anyone important to do this. I just do, especially this time of year. There’s the annual Christmas light tour, the must-have beef stew and cornbread we eat every Christmas Eve, the Christmas pajamas, the candles, the white lights and the way I get so preachy about such a silly thing, the sweaters…I secretly LOVE tacky Christmas sweaters and snowman earrings and puff paint…okay, maybe it isn’t a secret. It most definitely SHOULD be. I attend every live Nativity scene within a 100 miles radius (hello…road trip with fudge!). I cry every year when the little girl in the movie finds Prancer in her barn. I listen to Christmas music constantly from October through March (the season just doesn’t last long enough). My kids buy me the same Jim Brickman Christmas CD every year because I wear one out every season. I hear them snickering in the breakfast nook about their plans to play this at my funeral.

If ever a woman needed to read the book “Unplug the Christmas Machine,” it’s probably me, except for reasons I hope to continue to explore I don’t ever approach this season with dread or a stressed out longing for an experience that is different from the one that I (along with my husband, Clark Griswold) get to enjoy each season with our family. Perhaps my machine just needs a tune-up.


My favorite Christmas tradition is the church service on Christmas Eve. When we pass the candles and sing “Silent Night”….that seems to permeate everything for me, including the beef stew waiting for us at home after service. Including the presents and the busyness. As I listen to the younger moms in my bookclub I am inspired at the questions they ask of themselves, of their quest to intentionally create holidays which are glistening with the grace of Christ. We teach much this season to the little ones in our midst as we shape cookies and make room on our hearths and in our hearts for joy. There is much “Mary-ness” to the “Martha-ness” of this special season that is ONLY SIXTY DAYS AWAY!

One lesson I have learned over the years….Christmas has taught me this…the less I compartmentalize Christ, the less I compartmentalize Christmas, the less activities in my life don’t fall into the category of religious pursuit. I am not really a “religious” person for the sake of picking and choosing this or that as “celebrates the birth of Christ” or “doesn’t celebrate the birth of Christ appropriately.” I more or less believe that I bring my faith to whatever task I am choosing to undertake for a given day because the promise of the Spirit’s dwelling within me means there is something sacred as well as super-sweet in that fudge I am stirring. The more Christmases I celebrate, the more awe and worship I see in the simplest of things, in the materials of life, if not in the materialism.


After all, the stuff of life, even the human stuff, these were created by God for us to use, and use is sacred. I hope this book helps me to distinguish between use and misuse. It seems to me that defining activities in black and white when we all know Christmas colors are much closer to each other than that…reds, greens, gold…and with the proper touch blues and silvers and plum…this is perhaps the guilt-inducing pressure point that sends Christmas machines everywhere into overdrive and makes us eat too much fudge. We bring some incredibly complicated theologies into our Christmases, don’t we?

I can’t wait to explore all of this with my inspiring and intelligent bookclub ladies on Tuesday mornings at The Well. We are wired by our Creator to celebrate this birth that is never far away from a cross. It’s impossible to separate His coming from His going and His coming again. The newness of the season invites us every time– the sparkle on the snow at a time when God’s earth is declining, and yet for that to be the most tangible promise ever of a new spring. Let there be lights if not on our houses within our eyes…because the Light of the World has come.

-Submitted by Kerri Snell
Come study Unplug the Christmas Machine with us! Join us for Morning Blend - a morning book club for moms at The Well, Tuesdays from 9am to 10am.