Hello faithful family, friends, and followers and Merry Christmas! Thank you for taking the time in your busy schedules at this very busy time of year to stay on our adventure with us. We continue to be in awe of God’s healing mercy and grace finding ourselves able to celebrate our Savior’s birth in ways we never thought possible 10 months ago. Your faithful prayers have given us a truly marvelous and the most cherished Christmas present imaginable. The feeling of being enveloped in your prayers mirrors the apostle Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians when he writes:
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”
We’ve had a good week including some precious time with friends, running holiday errands, and baking Christmas cookies. We will have our family together at our home on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day we are traveling to Joy’s brother’s in Iowa to spend the day with Joy’s mother Ruth, another blessing we did not expect this Christmas.
In wanting to keep this brief, I’ll leave you with a Christmas reflection from Frederick Buechner as he writes:
“It was thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away, but it is a visit that for all our madness and cynicism and indifference and despair we have never quite forgotten. The oxen in their stalls. The smell of hay. The shepherds standing around. That child and that place are somehow the closest of all close encounters, the one we are closest to, the one that brings us closest to something that cannot be told in any other way. This story that faith tells in the fairytale language of faith is not just that God is, which God knows is a lot to swallow in itself much of the time, but that God comes. Comes here. “In great humility.” There is nothing much humbler than being born: naked, totally helpless, not much bigger than a loaf of bread. But with righteousness and faithfulness the girdle of his loins. And to us came. For us came. Is it true—not just the way fairytales are true but as the truest of all truths? Almighty God, are you true? When you are standing up to your neck in darkness, how do you say yes to that question? You say yes, I suppose, the only way faith can ever say it if it is honest with itself. You say yes with your fingers crossed. You say it with your heart in your mouth. Maybe that way we can say yes. He visited us. The world has never been quite the same since. It is still a very dark world, in some ways darker than ever before, but the darkness is different because he keeps getting born into it. The threat of holocaust. The threat of poisoning the earth and sea and air. The threat of our own deaths. The broken marriage. The child in pain. The lost chance. Anyone who has ever known him has known him perhaps better in the dark than anywhere else because it is in the dark where he seems to visit most often.”
From our home to yours we wish you a safe and blessed Christmas and once again, cannot thank you enough for your faithful support over the days, weeks, and months since the accident. With deepest love and appreciation, Merry Christmas, from Joy and Gary.
