Blame the pregger brain. Blame the backaches and lack of sleep. Blame my distractingly adorable baby niece or our ridiculously long to-do list. It’s 9:15 on Tuesday evening and this is the first time the fact that it’s Travelling Tuesday has occurred to me.
We’re still friends right?
The great news is, we were blessed with a fantabulous new camera, and I am over the moon to have some beautiful shots for you from the holidays. Whoo-hoo! There’s so much to share this might take a few days…but let’s get started anyway!
My Mom’s Tree was the most magical it has ever been. I can’t believe I haven’t spent more time staring at it.
The cousins got back together, and it was like no time had passed at all. Neither the Bear nor his parents endorse smoking crayons.
The Bear practiced a few tunes and had them ready for Emmi Claire’s arrival.
WE MADE COOKIES! But I opened the can of premade icing can we bought at Target (pictured below) that had several nozzles and was supposed to make icing cookies a breeze and it fizzed and popped and then the icing wouldn’t come out. My Mom saved the day and whipped up some icing from scratch, which I decided to divide and colour, and we ended up having more colours and prettier cookies in the end!
All’s well that ends well, hey?
We were pleased with the finished product, and for the next several days instead of asking for “break” (meaning breakfast) each morning, the Bear signed and repeatedly asked for cook-ee, cook-eee…
The Bear got a puppy!
And my cutie-pie niece seemed to just keep getting cuter and cuter!
See what I mean?
My brother arrived and his dog became the resident reindeer.
A happy Christmas morning finally came…
And the cousins had a few new toys to … share.
And a few more after a visit to Gpa’s house, where it was also discovered that Emmi Claire loves butterbeans.
Even the iPhoto calendars are getting cuter!
And though there are lots more photos I’m looking forward to sharing, we’ll have to call it a Tuesday right here…because after all of the delightful holiday togetherness…
I feel a bit like this!
Happy Tuesday, Happy Holidays…Happy Trails for the year ahead! The best, dear friends, is yet to come.
There are a lot of areas in life where timing is everything. How long something stays in the oven or on top of the stove, did you buy this milk last week or last month, if he’d thrown that pass a moment sooner, we would have been state champions, she told me she loved me but I waited too long to say it back.
This year our white Christmas arrived on December 26th, and we woke up to buckets of snow falling from the sky and 2-3 inches layered on the ground. For some, the snow day meant a day of hindered travel, an extra day far from loved ones, a day where business is not happening or a long awaited flight isn’t taking off. For others, it meant an extra day with family and friends, a few more hours of togetherness before a long drive or a late flight commences, or perhaps it just kept everyone together for a few more hours, when a general dispersing would usually have taken place sooner. While this snow day brought a little extra togetherness for us, the lesson in every possibility is clear: Timing is everything.
We don’t exactly know for sure that Jesus’ birth came on December 25th, 2,000 years ago. We don’t know how much he weighed, how many inches long he was, or whether he was bald or had a head full of hair. But from the scriptural account in Luke, we do know that He was on time:
So it was that while they were there {in Bethlehem for the census} the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, for there was no room for them in the inn.Luke 2:6-7
Based on how long it normally takes for a baby to come to full term and be born, whether they counted days or weeks or months or seasons in those days, Mary knew the time had come, and Jesus was to be born. He didn’t come while they were still journeying to Bethlehem, or while they were on the way home. In Bethlehem the full-term baby was delivered, just as the prophets had predicted centuries before, and right on time.
I’ve been thinking a lot about premature and full-term births, being pregnant myself this Christmas. We know that in most cases, unless the life of the child or mother is in danger, it’s normally healthiest for babies to be born around that 40-week marker. And this Christmas, it struck a chord with me that Jesus was on time.
It reminded me that He’s always on time. And that, even though we sometimes feel like we’re in the middle of a crazy long wait, or something has come sooner than we expected, we can trust that with Jesus, if we’re trusting Him to come through for us, He’ll be there on time, even if on time isn’t as quickly (or is more quickly) than we would’ve preferred.
While I’m thinking about this year in my life, taking stock of what has happened and navigating the road map of what’s ahead, I’m encouraged that I can trust Jesus to point me in the direction of the right timing. If I follow His lead, I won’t prematurely jump into something, but I won’t stay in a comfy warm bubble when it’s time to step out, either.
If we have seventy or eighty years to steward, more than anything else, it’s worth considering that timing is everything. It is good to wait on the Lord. It is good to step out where He leads and when He leads.
May His Star lead you to the place where Jesus can be born into every situation in your life. May you pause to reflect with gratitude at what has gone by this year. May the grace and strength of Jesus enable you to see each season of life through to full-term. And may you remember with joy the grace that’s available for each and every season.
Late one evening three years ago, on a chilly Southern Christmas Eve, two little elves scurried out on a last minute errand. They hadn’t forgotten a gift or a card or an ingredient for a Christmas treat. On a tiny inkling, they tip-toed the aisles of a Walgreens, until they found what they were looking for.
Staring at boxes boasting early results and better accuracy, the elves discussed the choices quietly amongst themselves and came to an agreement. They gingerly presented the goods to the cashier, made their purchase, and hurried home.
Half an hour later they stood in an upstairs bedroom, staring at two pink lines for the second time in ten minutes. They laughed and cried and wondered and marveled at this special gift from above. The timing of this surprise discovery could not have been more magical. To this day the elves agree: that gift is by far the best Christmas gift they’ve ever received, bar One other Gift of immeasurable significance, which actually arrived in a similar fashion, around 2000 years earlier.
It feels safe to say the very best gifts don’t come in any boxes at all.
Merry Christmas Eve, boys and girls! I hope you are enjoying today with family and friends somewhere around the world! I am most certainly enjoying being with family here in the Carolinas, but also missing our folks back in SA!
Hero Hubs put together a little video to share with some of our partners back here in the US (and around the world!) about our first year ministering in South Africa. We’ve just uploaded it to youtube and I thought I’d share it with you here! The beautiful singing in the background was recorded when we visited Mirriam and her children and they sang to say thank you to us and to the Lord for the special moment and their new shoes. Wow.
I hope you enjoy the video…and that it’ll give you pause to say thanks for what you have this Christmas!
I suppose I didn’t keep you up this evening mulling and scouring over ten photos! You clever lassies figured it out before I had time to get up and get a bowl of cereal! (I eat cereal every night before bedtime right now.)
Well, guys and gals, here’s the scoop. {For the ones of you who didn’t read the comments of the last post or figure it out, anyway}.
The photos were all taken with the same camera. They were not taken by yours truly, but by Hero Hubs. And all of those photos, taken within the past couple of weeks by Hero Hubs (you may have figured some of this out, hey?) were taken with a new camera. And not just any new camera. Our new camera.
It turns out that even before some of you, dear friends and readers, were being so wonderful as to clickety-clack your keyboards and write encouraging emails to Canon (which really blessed me!), someone else had it in mind to bless us with a new camera when we next returned to the States (unless it worked out for them to send it to us with visitors before we returned for the holidays.)
So, some beautiful boxes, wrapped in Christmas paper by some beautiful fingers, were waiting for us here in the Carolinas. They contained a beautiful, shiny new camera with two lenses, and a lovely bag, and a bunch of other bells and whistles that I might bore you with if I go on. And we are SO blessed, SO encouraged, SO thankful…SO many words that seem SO overused when trying to describe how you feel about receiving something that is just so kind and so generous you don’t quite have the words to fully respond.
The wonderful donors responsible for this act of delightful kindness would prefer to remain anonymous, so may I perhaps suggest we all just say a special prayer as we read this, that they’ll be especially blessed by the presence and goodness of Jesus during this holiday season, and in the year to come? The Lord knows who they are, and, being fully assured that it’s more blessed to give than to receive, I am excited at the thought of the return of blessings to them, because of the seeds they’ve sown.
{Dear sweet donors, you know who you are — again and again and again, thank you.}
Now that I’ve connected the dots on the Guess-the-Connection Photo Challenge, I hope you’re excited as I am about our very special Early Christmas Present. Wow.
I hope you’ll get back to enjoying Presence and not just thinking about presents! We are excited about enjoying and especially capturing the presence of family together this holiday season, and having an awesome camera at our fingertips to help us do it! There are some absolutely adorable cookie-decorating-cousins photos waiting to be downloaded and uploaded from today!
For so many reasons, which deserve their own blog post, this story is a beautiful example of how the Lord redeems rough stuff, and, just as I’d trusted when I first shared the story, God has worked this out for good in our lives. Whoo HOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
xCC
P.S. In case you’re wondering…we were seriously blessed with an awesome camera kit. We have so many more exciting photo-magic possibilities at our fingertips than we did before. As I type Hero Hubs is busy reading the manual and testing out features. And to answer the question you might really be wondering, it’s a Nikon. 😉
I create resources to help people find deeper, more meaningful relationships with God through pursuing, pondering, and prayer. The "Shop" link above will take you to the home of many of the lovely resources I’ve created to help you keep walking one day deeper with Jesus.
The cousins got back together, and it was like no time had passed at all. Neither the Bear nor his parents endorse smoking crayons.
The Bear practiced a few tunes and had them ready for Emmi Claire’s arrival.
WE MADE COOKIES! But I opened the can of premade icing can we bought at Target (pictured below) that had several nozzles and was supposed to make icing cookies a breeze and it fizzed and popped and then the icing wouldn’t come out. My Mom saved the day and whipped up some icing from scratch, which I decided to divide and colour, and we ended up having more colours and prettier cookies in the end!
And my cutie-pie niece seemed to just keep getting cuter and cuter!
See what I mean?
My brother arrived and his dog became the resident reindeer.
A happy Christmas morning finally came…
And a few more after a visit to Gpa’s house, where it was also discovered that Emmi Claire loves butterbeans.
Even the iPhoto calendars are getting cuter!
And though there are lots more photos I’m looking forward to sharing, we’ll have to call it a Tuesday right here…because after all of the delightful holiday togetherness…
I feel a bit like this!
Happy Tuesday, Happy Holidays…Happy Trails for the year ahead! The best, dear friends, is yet to come.
I create resources to help people find deeper, more meaningful relationships with God through pursuing, pondering, and prayer. The "Shop" link above will take you to the home of many of the lovely resources I’ve created to help you keep walking one day deeper with Jesus.