Day of Gratitude

We are continuing “Celebrating Holidays at the Cafe” today!  Grab a cup of coffee, take a break from the turkey preparations, and join us!

This morning, my husband and I will head south to the small town of Orlinda, Tennessee for our family celebration.  Yes, I spelled that correctly.  O-R-L-I-N-D-A.  I promise that it’s nothing like that place in Florida where Mickey lives.

Anyway, we’ll head south to Tennessee (which my husband refers to as “the Promised Land”), where we look forward to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with our extended family.  It’s not elaborate, but it’s good, and definitely something for which we are thankful.

We are certainly thankful this year for the big things in life – family, friends, health, our home, our work.  We never want to take these things for granted, and we know that each one is a special gift from God.

I am also thankful for many of the “little” pleasures of life – hot coffee, baked apple pie candles, good music, a great book, fuzzy socks, and flannel pj’s.

And yet, I am most grateful for this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it … He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.  He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.  Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.  The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.  We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.  John 1:1-5, 10-14

 

Holiday Traditions & Ideas

From now until Christmas, Thursdays will be devoted to participating in “Celebrating Holidays at the Cafe.”  If you are a blogging kind of woman, come on in and join us!  This week, we are talking about our holiday traditions.

One of the first “traditions” that my family observes every holiday season is to participate in the madness that is Black Friday.  I realize that this doesn’t have one single thing to do with Christ’s birth, but it is an annual ritual of which we do partake.

My mother instituted this particular tradition many years ago when I was too young to be able to say whether or not I wanted to attend.  As an adult, I leave armed with a shopping list, determined to mark as many gifts off the list as is humanly possible in the time that we spend at the mall.  I think that shopping over the Internet is the most wonderful invention ever, but if I am going to the mall on the craziest shopping day of the year, I want to make the trip worth it.

Because my husband is in the ministry and this is only our second year at our current church, we don’t yet have a lot of Christmas traditions here.  I hope that, over time, we will find church-wide and city-wide events that become meaningful traditions to us.

One of the traditions that we enjoyed, and still miss, from our previous church – New Salem Baptist Church in Cox’s Creek, KY – is Christmas caroling.  Not many experiences bond together a group of fellow church members like standing in the cold, the rain, the snow and singing Christmas carols outside someone’s home!  I can remember caroling to an Alzheimer’s patient who, although she no longer recognized any of us, could remember all of the words to “Joy to the World.”  I remember one dear lady who, although confined to a wheel chair, when shaking your hand would squeeze the rings right off your fingers.  I remember one family’s homemade fudge candy!

This year, I am so excited that our Sunday School class at Yellow Creek Baptist Church has decided to go Christmas caroling on the night we have our class party.  Woo-hoo!  It’s going to be a blast!

The Christmas Eve service at New Salem was also a wonderful tradition for us.  We would read the Scriptures about the birth of Jesus, light advent candles, sing carols, and partake of the Lord’s Supper.  I always closed the evening by playing a special arrangement of “Silent Night” on the piano as we lit candles around the sanctuary.

My extended family has an annual tradition of Christmas Eve dinner.  I get to see cousins who I don’t see any other time of the year.  My mother’s cousin always makes the turkey and dressing.  Last year I had the privilege of making the peanut butter balls for the first time … and of hearing my cousin’s husband remarking how good they were!

T. and I always manage to get off by ourselves, just like we did when we were little girls.  We were the only girls among a bunch of boys, so finding our own little corner to play in was a precious thing.

In our segmented society, traditions are difficult to maintain.  With people rarely staying in one town for their entire lives, we have to develop new traditions to accommodate our changing society.  Some traditions need to be evaluated, and possibly even discarded, because they no longer serve a purpose, or because the purpose they did serve is no longer meaningful.

But that’s not to say we shouldn’t try to maintain some traditions, particularly at this time of the year.  Maybe we could use some “rules of thumb” for evaluating what we keep and what we discard:

1) Do our traditions proclaim the message of Christ to our friends and family members?

2) Do our traditions still serve a purpose?

3) What are we passing on through our traditions?

4) Do we keep our traditions for God’s glory, or for our own?

As you create meaningful traditions for your own families, consider that a legacy of loving and serving God is the most important tradition that you can leave behind.  Merry Christmas!

 

Work and Faith

Colossians 3:23-24 states, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

How would your life look differently if you embraced and believed fully what the verse in Colossians states? If the truth above is something you already believe and actively live out, how does this truth make a difference in your life?

 

When we work for the Lord (whether that is secular employment, volunteer work, ministry, or work at home), we trade…

…selfishness for the desires of others.

…irritability for patience.

…control for letting go.

…the desire for the praise of other people with contentment to not be noticed.

…doing things “good enough” with giving our best talents and abilities.

 …our personal agenda for a Kingdom focus.

When we work “as for the Lord,” we must consider His guidelines for right living.  We must follow the Golden Rule and treat others as we want to be treated.  We must keep a Great Commission focus so that we are always sharing Christ with those whom we meet.

Does this mean we do everything perfectly?  Of course not!  It does mean, however, that we do our best.  If we are accountable to God for our work, do we not want to please Him with everything that we do?  I sure do!

 

Chit-Chat Cafe and Your Passion

 

What is one thing or cause that you are passionate about? (More specifically, something you feel that the Lord has burdened your heart with)

Like many of the others who answered this week’s question, I could probably come up with a whole list of things for which I am burdened.  Narrowing myself down to just one takes a bit of work, but here goes…

I believe that we who teach women in the church must emphasize the importance of women learning to study the Scriptures for themselves.

I know that there is a place for pre-packaged Bible studies that can be bought through your local Christian bookstore.  I have actually taught a number of these myself.  When a church does not have a strong teacher for women, or when a group of new believers begin to study the Bible together, having a model to follow can be beneficial.  Many of these studies are written on topics that women find interesting, and like-minded women can gather around a study for a limited period of time for fellowship, encouragement, and learning.  These studies can be helpful, when used properly.

However, nothing can substitute for daily opening the Word of God and reading it for ourselves.

…they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. (Acts 17:11, ESV)

In this passage, Paul commends the Bereans for being willing to study for themselves and to test what Paul and Silas were saying against the revealed Word of God.

I believe that we are doing a disservice to the women in our churches if we do not teach them how to interpret and apply the Bible for themselves.  While we may get a measure of this from a Bible study workbook, most of the hard work is still being done for us by the author.

Just as the Bereans, we live in a world where not all “Bible teachers” are interested in an accurate interpretation of the Word.  Preachers and teachers are available to us 24/7, thanks to the television, radio, and the Internet.  We must teach our women to examine the Scriptures for themselves so that they can know whether or not what they are hearing and reading is actually what the Bible says.

By teaching them to “feed” themselves with the Word of God, we are protecting them from the subtle influence of the world around them, a world that is not interested in their spiritual growth.  New Age spirituality, watered-down Christianity, and the world of cults are common in our media, through celebrities, and on talk shows.  Women must learn to identify these influences and to warn others against them.

To my friends at LifeWay and Moody … I am not out to eliminate your jobs!  There is a time and place for the studies that you work so hard to publish.  Many of them are very good and helpful, and provide useful resources for women’s ministries.

I would just remind us to be Bereans, studying the Word for ourselves first, and then using these wonderful Bible studies to fill in the gaps.

 

Internet Cafe and the Weekly Meme

Over at The Internet Cafe, blogging women can participate in a weekly meme, so I thought I would give it a stab this week.  Yes, I had to look “meme” up in the dictionary, and for those of you who will admit that you don’t know what it means either, Webster’s says “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.”  Now, that’s settled.  Moving on.

This week’s topic is:

What is one thing that you absolutely love about friendships? Why? On the other side, what is one thing that you find absolutely difficult when it comes to friendships? Why?

I have so many different kinds of friends … childhood friends, college friends, work friends, church friends, life-long friends, and so many others.  One of the great things in my life has been meeting so many different kinds of people who each have their own experiences and interests, and learning from one another.

Ann-Marie is one of my closest friends.  We have known each other for fourteen years.  Although we no longer live in the same city, we can pick up the phone, send an e-mail, or take a road trip, and it’s as if we were never apart!  Time and distance have not altered how much we enjoy each other.

I still spend one morning a year with the first friend I made in kindergarden.  Even though we live over 2,000 miles from each other, we can still e-mail and text about our favorite television shows, and see one another at Christmas.

One of the hardest parts of friendship is knowing that some are just for a season.  During the time we spent at Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY, we said goodbye to many dear friends.  Some of these folks we will see again, some we may not.  We were blessed by all of them.

So, what about you?  What are some ways that friendships have blessed your life?  If you blog, why not take up the meme?  If not, feel free to leave a comment!