Christmas

   The official Christmas season begins at midnight on Christmas Eve and ends with Epiphany on January 6th. Advent, the time to prepare for Christmas, is a whirlwind of activity at All Saints’ Church, starting with the first Wednesday of December when we have the annual children’s St. Nicholas party followed the next Wednesday by the youth group party. Wedged in between is a special Saturday rehearsal for the youth choir the day before they sing at the Lesson and Carols service. Interwoven through these events is the preparation, rehearsal and performance of the Christmas pageant.

   Once the pageant is over and the seven o’clock service wraps up on Christmas Eve, Christmas begins. Christmas Day and the following week are devoted to being with my family; my children, my husband, my extended family. It is a rare opportunity for the family to be together without the pull of work and school, of deadlines and alarm clocks. 

   In our family we have a traditional Christmas dinner on the 25th with our family and friends, then on the 28th is Grandpa’s birthday so we have a reason to gather again and over indulge in beef and chocolate (not at the same time). We have a final celebration on New year’s eve or new year’s day where we gather and drink Champagne and nibble at left over cookies.

   There is no substitute for just being together cooking, eating, napping, reading. Spending time being in each other’s presence working and playing side by side builds strong relationships. It is how Jesus built relationships with his disciples. It is how we build our relationships with God, with our spouses, with our children. We are together working at a task together or playing together, interacting not just existing. Listening to each other and responding. Giving love and receiving it, these are the most important gifts of Christmas.


Peace,
Michelle

Unexpected Sources of Blessing

I usually write about parenting. This time I am writing as a youth minister and a wife and a daughter.

A month ago it was Wednesday morning and youth group loomed near. I had a lesson planned, but I didn’t like it. It seemed random and disconnected.

As I ate breakfast with my husband I asked him, “What should I teach those kids tonight?”

 “Teach them something about acknowledging that people older than them might be worthy of a little of their respect, and might know a few things worth knowing. And teach them not to be so self-absorbed,” was his reply.

 I suspected this answer did not spring from the depths of spiritual contemplation, but more likely a recent and frustrating conversation with one or the other of our teenagers. I was pretty sure I couldn’t do all of that in 60 minutes. I gave him a noncommittal response. It seemed like a kernel of something, but I wasn’t sure what and, well, I hadn't really expected an anwer.

After my husband left for the office my mother called. She had thirty minutes to kill between two appointments and wondered if she could stop by. Well, I wasn't getting anywhere with a new lesson so I was happy for the distraction.

When Mom arrived she began to tell me about her morning’s work. It was her first visit to a nursing home as a hospice volunteer. She told me stories about chatting with those who were dying. She told me a lot about the training. She mentioned she is going to have to keep up with baseball because several of the gentlemen wanted to discuss the latest games. Just before she left she mentioned that if my youth kids ever had any extra time maybe they could make picture books for her. At the training they had received simple books made from construction paper and yarn. Each page having a nice picture from a magazine or calendar glued on its. The hospice volunteers used these as conversation starters and a pleasant way to pass the time during a visit.

Now to give this some context, many, many people think the teenagers at the church should do various things, usually things no one else would want to do. My mom is not one of those people.  In my four years as a youth minister my mother has never suggested that I get the teens to do anything, so for her to suggest an activity was out of the ordinary.

After she left I was praying and then it seemed so clear. I knew somewhere in the Bible it said that families should care for their own widows and the church should care for those who had no families to care for them. On-line bibles are a wonderful thing for busy youth ministers. A quick little word search and I found it in 1 Timothy. I had a lesson.

That evening, I explained a little about hospice, about caring for people at the end of their lives, about our responsibility to our grandparents and old aunties and even our parents. I asked them to consider that sometimes caring for others is not about us at all, but about our duty to others and to God. We read the verses in 1 Timothy 5.

I told them the story of being in the fifth grade and dreading a visit to my grandmother’s house. My mother told me that my grandmother wouldn’t be with us much longer so we had to go. We went that year and every year after that. Nineteen years later, when I was 29 years old and attended that grandmother’s funeral, I was glad that I had visited with her all of those times since my first complaint. Sometimes we do things because it is right, whether we want to or not. Sometimes we are blessed as a result.

 I explained what we were going to make. The kids were very quiet, they were very intense and then they dug into the project with sincere enthusiasm. They were seriously concerned about choosing the right pictures for someone who was dying. For a few minutes, they were thinking of someone they didn’t know, would never know and doing their best to care for them with their project. When we wrapped up we had at least 30 different pages for my mom to assemble as books.

They understood the message of caring for the dying, of looking outward at people different in age and experience, rather than inward toward their own peer group. Through my husband’s words and my mother’s hospice ministry God was able to create compassion in our teens which connected them to a different generation if only for a few minutes on a Wednesday night.

I couldn't have asked for more than that. It was a surprising and blessed evening.

Listen for God's voice in places you least expect it.

Michelle