It’s Advent – the four weeks before Christmas – and I’ve been struck by the number of times I’ve heard the phrase ‘Sure that’s what Christmas is all about’. It seems to me that we all want to know what it’s all about, we all want others to know what it’s all about – and maybe in the end of the day we’re all a bit confused as to what it’s all about.

Here are some of the things I’ve heard or read in the last few weeks – I’m sure you will identify and sympathise with at least some of them:

It’s a glimmer of hope: ‘The whole point of Christmas is that – whatever your religious beliefs – it should be a celebration of hope in the gloomiest, darkest month of the year.’

Or it’s about fun: ‘Christmas is all about fun, so enjoy it.’

On the other side of the coin, the person feeling the pressure of the season – and who hasn’t? – says: ‘It’s all about making food for people to eat, serving it and clearing up afterwards. I’ll be glad when it’s over.’

And – on a similar vein – ‘It’s a pain in the backside. Just an excuse for commercialism’.

So what about this – is this getting nearer to the truth? ‘Christmas is not about buying expensive gifts, but spending as much time with your family as you possibly can.’

Or what about this perspective? ‘Christmas is a wonderful chance to take stock. I don’t take any of our good fortune for granted but instead thank God that everyone is healthy – that’s the best Christmas preent I could receive.’

And here’s a more spiritual approach: ‘Christmas is really about sharing life and love with friends and family in the darkest month of the year. If it’s all getting too much, find a place of worship to sit in and calm your nerves, or light a candle and meditate on the flame.’

So, what is Christmas all about? Fun? Family? A time to take stock? Eating too much? Spending too much?

I think many of us can identify with most of the statements above. We enjoy the food and the gifts and the family-gatherings. We like the ‘feel good’ factor about Christmas. I was struck recently on a visit to a well-known coffee shop to see words like PEACE and JOY and LOVE decorating the walls for Christmas. These are things which help produce that warm fuzzy feeling we associate with Christmas – things we all yearn for and yet things which seem terribly elusive in our world of economic recession, cancer and war.

So is Christmas just an excuse to indulge ourselves so as to forget reality in the darkest month of the year? Is there no more to it than that?

Or if you’re a Christian, is it about multiple carol services and Sunday School plays and youth performances? Do you tend to get to Christmas Eve exhausted from the sheer busyness of it all?

I had the privilege of attending a concert on Friday night by the New Irish Orchestra – and what an evening it was! We got to sing our old favourite carols, experience the feel-good factor of the nostalgia which they bring (the audience singing ‘Away in a Manger’ accapella was a wonderful reminder of childhood) – but we were also brought face to face with what surely is the real meaning of Christmas.

At the heart of the festivities, the food and the fun lies the reason for the season: God sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world! The unique omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God, Creator of the universe, stepped into time, taking the form of a little vulnerable human baby – in order to save us from our sins. What a miracle! What grace! What great news! What cause for fun and festivity and family gatherings!

At the concert, the orchestra performed a song based on these words by Derick Bingham which encapsulate it all:

From Behind the Sun

Again Lord by the Spirit’s power,

We’d capture the wonder of the hour

When Deity stooped down to possess

A little infant child, no less

in Bethlehem.

Lord we would seek to comprehend

That you, the beginnng and the end,

Creator of stars and galaxies could lie in Mary’s arms at ease

in Bethlehem.

We thrill O Lord to see you come;

The Light from far behind the Sun,

To lighten our despairing world as grace upon grace unfurled,

in Bethlehem.

For God so loved the world He gave

His only Son our souls to save,

And now with worship unconcealed

We gaze at Glory gently  veiled

in Bethlehem.

So let’s make sure we put CHRIST back at the beginning of CHRISTmas!

It’s been a long time since I posted anything on my blog – but let’s not go into the reasons for that. Since hearing Jani Ortlund speak on this topic at New Horizon this summer, I’ve been meaning to blog about it – and here I am at last.

I thought that Jani achieved a good balance between presenting biblical teaching and creating an ambiance which was intimate enough for participants to want to share together their experiences, privileges and challenges of being married to the minister!

She chose three headings on which to hang her talk:

1. Risking your Reputation (Exodus 20:16; Leviticus 19; Colossians 3:9)

Here Jani talked about the use of the tongue – both our own tongues and other people’s tongues.

(a) As far as our own are concerned, we were challenged to guard our tongues and to strive to be truthful all of the time. Truth stabilises relationships but we live in a culture of lies. (James 3:2,8; Psalm 141:3; Proverbs 16:24.)

(b) As for other people’s tongues, what minister’s wife has not borne the brunt of criticism, gossip or lies, either about herself or about her husband? Jani encouraged us, instead of wasting emotional energy on defending ourselves or our husbands, to turn to God. (Proverbs 18:21; 17:9; I Peter 3:9.)

2. Refining your Romance

Here, Jani talked to us about two main areas:

(a) Respect your husband’s work (Ephesians 4:29; 5:33)

In her own inimitable style, Jani encouraged us to affirm and appreciate our husbands, be first in line to encourage them after a sermon and to defend them, figuring out ways to enter their castles when they withdraw.

She warned against giving them advice – they get enough of that already, often unsolicited! – and our advice can often be misinterpreted as criticism. (This led to a discussion on what is a helpful way to offer advice and here Ray, Jani’s husband, helpfully shared an example from their own marriage when he was a young minister, they had young kids at home, and he was also taking classes at seminary – Jani had to gently point out to him that he was in danger of losing his family because they just never saw him – but it was the  gentle, non-intimidating spirit in which she did it which effectively spoke to him).

If we respect our husband’s work, then our children will too – but the opposite is also true. If we moan and complain when he is unavoidably late for dinner, our children will pick that up and come to see the ministry as something negative. Jani talked about using that as an opportunity to pray with her children for their Dad who had been held up due to an urgent hospital visit – and so the children learned to support their Dad and appreciate the ministry.

(b) Teach him how to love you (Proverbs 5:15-19; Song of Solomon 4:9; Malachi 2:13-15)

Jani warned that we need to use words to teach our husbands how to comfort us – if not they will never learn and we will turn to something else and our kids will never see how a man can comfort his wife.

3. Relish your Redemption (Hebrews 6:10; I Corinthians 15:58; Psalm 62:1; Psalm 36:7-9)

My commitment to my marriage means that I’m prepared to be unhappy sometimes – and find my joy in God. When ministry is difficult – as it often is – I must choose to follow Him.

Jani posed the challenging question: ‘What will your husband become because he married you?’

Recommended Reading:

His Loving Law, Our Lasting Legacy: Living the Ten Commandments and Giving Them to Our Children by Jani Ortlund

Faithful Women and Their Extraordinary God by Noel Piper

If you’ve ever asked that question – or one similar – read this article by Elisaeth Eliot, taken from her daily devotionals at Back to the Bible website.

“OK now, which one of you clowns put that bag of M ‘n’ Ms in the grocery cart?” The mother looks harried.

Two boys, maybe five and seven, eye each other and race away toward the gumball machine near the supermarket door. There is an infant strapped to a plastic board on top of the groceries, and a two year old occupying the built-in child seat in the cart. The mother picks up the M ‘n’ M candy bag and starts toward the aisle to return it. The two year old screams and she relents, throws the bag in with the rest of her purchases, patiently waits her turn at the check-out, fishes five ten-dollar bills from her purse, receives her small change, and pushing the cart with the babies in it, herds the two boys through the rain to the station wagon in the parking lot.

I go with her in my mind’s eye. Jump out in the rain. Open the garage door. Drive in. Close door. Babies, boys, bags into the house in how many trips? Phone rings. Answer phone, change baby, wipe muddy tracks from kitchen floor. Feed baby, put groceries away, hide M ‘n’ Ms, start peeling vegetables, take clothes out of dryer, stop fight between two older children, feed two year old, answer phone again, fold clothes, change baby, get boys to:
1) hang up coats,
2) stop teasing two year old,
3) set table.
Light oven, put baby to bed, stop fight, mop up two year old, put chicken in oven, answer phone, put away clothes, finish peeling vegetables, look peaceful and radiant–husband will be home soon.

I see this implacable succession of exigencies in my mind’s eye. They come with being a mother. I also see the dreams she dreams sometimes–write a novel, agents call, reviews come in. TV interviews, autograph parties, promotional traveling, a movie contract–preposterous dreams. Try something a little more realistic. Cool modern office, beautiful clothes, make-up and hairdo that stay done all day. A secretarial job perhaps, nothing spectacular, but it’s work that actually produces something that doesn’t have to be done over at once. It’s work that ends at five o’clock. It means something.

I know how it is. I have a mother. I am a mother. I’ve produced a mother (my daughter, Valerie, has a two year old and expects another child soon). I watched my own mother cope valiantly and efficiently with a brood of six. (“If one child takes all your time,” she used to say, “six can’t take any more.”) We were–we still are–her life. I understand that. Of all the gifts of my life surely those of being somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother are among the greatest.

But I watch my daughter and other mothers of her generation and I see they have some strikes against them that we didn’t have. They have been told insistently and quite persuasively that motherhood is a drag, that tradition is nonsense, that what people have always regarded as “women’s work” is meaningless, that “roles” (a word we never bothered much about until a decade or so ago) are changing, that femininity is a mere matter of social conditioning, that it’s time to innovate. If the first-grade readers show a picture of a woman driving a hook-and-ladder and a man doing a nurse’s job, see what happens to the conditioning. Abolish the stereotypes and we can abolish the myths of masculinity and femininity.

I hear this sort of claptrap, and young mothers often come to me troubled because they can’t answer the arguments logically or theologically. They feel, deep in their bones, that there is something terribly twisted about the whole thing but they can’t put their finger on what it is.

I think I know what it is. Profanity. Not swearing. I’m not talking about breaking the Third Commandment. I’m talking about treating as meaningless that which is freighted with meaning. Treating as common that which is hallowed. Regarding as a mere triviality what is really a divine design. Profanity is failure to see the inner mystery.

When women–sometimes well-meaning, earnest, truth seeking ones say “Get out of the house and do something creative, find something meaningful, something with more direct access to reality,” it is a dead giveaway that they have missed the deepest definition of creation, of meaning, of reality. And when you start seeing the world as opaque, that is, as an end in itself instead of as transparent, when you ignore the Other World where this one ultimately finds its meaning, of course housekeeping (and any other kind of work if you do it long enough) becomes tedious and empty.

But what have buying groceries, changing diapers and peeling vegetables got to do with creativity? Aren’t those the very things that keep us from it? Isn’t it that kind of drudgery that keeps us in bondage? It’s insipid and confining, it’s what one conspicuous feminist called “a life of idiotic ritual, full of forebodings and failure.” To her I would answer ritual, yes. Idiotic, no, not to the Christian–for although we do the same things anybody else does, and we do them over and over in the same way, the ordinary transactions of everyday life are the very means of transfiguration. It is the common stuff of this world which, because of the Word’s having been “made flesh,” is shot through with meaning, with charity, with the glory of God.

But this is what we so easily forget. Men as well as women have listened to those quasi-rational claims, have failed to see the fatal fallacy, and have capitulated. Words like personhood, liberation, fulfillment and equality have had a convincing ring and we have not questioned their popular definitions or turned on them the searchlight of Scripture or even of our common sense. We have meekly agreed that the kitchen sink is an obstacle instead of an altar, and we have obediently carried on our shoulders the chips these reductionists have told us to carry.

This is what I mean by profanity. We have forgotten the mystery, the dimension of glory. It was Mary herself who showed it to us so plainly. By the offering up of her physical body to become the God-bearer, she transfigured for all mothers, for all time, the meaning of motherhood. She cradled, fed and bathed her baby–who was very God of very God–so that when we cradle, feed and bathe ours we may see beyond that simple task to the God who in love and humility “dwelt among us and we beheld his glory.”

Those who focus only on the drabness of the supermarket, or on the onions or the diapers themselves, haven’t an inkling of the mystery that is at stake here, the mystery revealed in the birth of that Baby and consummated on the Cross: my life for yours.

The routines of housework and of mothering may be seen as a kind of death, and it is appropriate that they should be, for they offer the chance, day after day, to lay down one’s life for others. Then they are no longer routines. By being done with love and offered up to God with praise, they are thereby hallowed as the vessels of the tabernacle were hallowed–not because they were different from other vessels in quality or function, but because they were offered to God. A mother’s part in sustaining the life of her children and making it pleasant and comfortable is no triviality. It calls for self-sacrifice and humility, but it is the route, as was the humiliation of Jesus, to glory.

To modern mothers I would say “Let Christ himself be your example as to what your attitude should be. For he, who had always been God by nature, did not cling to his prerogatives as God’s equal, but stripped himself of all privilege by consenting to be a slave by nature and being born as a mortal man. And, having become man, he humbled himself by living a life of utter obedience, even to the extent of dying, and the death he died was the death of a common criminal. That is why God has now lifted him so high. . .” (Phil. 2:5-11 Phillips).

It is a spiritual principle as far removed from what the world tells us as heaven is removed from hell: If you are willing to lose your life, you’ll find it. It is the principle expressed by John Keble in 1822:

If on our daily course our mind
Be set to hallow all we find,
New treasures still, of countless price,
God will provide for sacrifice.

A good friend, a next door neighbour, a member of our church in Switzerland, a member of our small group, a lady who loved life, loved her family and loved the Lord – all this was DedeGayi who suddenly, with almost no warning, went to be with the Lord on Thursday

night. Your infectious laughter, your zest for life and your love for God’s people will be missed by us all, Dede.

It is not for the flock of sheep to know the pasture the Shepherd has in mind. It is for them simply to follow Him. If they knew that his plans included a valley of deep shadow, they would panic. Keeping close to the one they have learned to trust is all that is necessary. He will faithfully provide rest, refreshment, correction, and protection as the needs arise. His accompanying presence is guaranteed, all the way–even through the darkest shadows–to the house of the Lord. Elisabeth Elliot – available as part of a daily email devotional at http://www.backtothebible.org

I am reading ‘The Roots of Endurance’ by John Piper, which is the story of three great men of a bygone era: John Newton, Charles Simeon and William Wilberforce. John Piper studied the lives of these three men because he wanted to know what it was that made them persevere amidst great suffering and tremendous resistance. Piper contends that we live in an era of emotional fragility – and we would do well to learn from the lives of these men who seem to have had a secret of endurance which few of us have.

Here is something which struck me from the words of Charles Simeon: ‘My rule is – never to hear, or see, or know, what if heard, or seen, or known, would call for animadversion from me. Hence it is that I dwell in peace in the midst of lions.’ Piper comments: ‘We would all do well not to be curious about what others are saying about us. There is little good that can come of it: pride, if the comments are good; discouragement, if they are critical; anger, if they are false. These are not the emotions we need to cultivate. Trusted cousnel from reliable people, not rumors, is the stuff of good self-assessment.’

Perhaps one of the reasons for our modern emotional fragility is an over-awareness of what others think and say about us – and an under-awareness of what God thinks and says about us. Charles Simeon ‘devoted the first four hours of the day to private prayer and the devotional study of the Scriptures….Here was the secret of his great grace and spiritual strength.’

The UN Pro-Life Petition has grown to 200,000 names! 
 
Let’s go even higher!! 
 
Let’s get 300,000 names! 
 
Once more please ask everyone you know to go to
http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.95/default.asp and sign the petition!

And ask them to ask all their friends, too!

I have been reading Alexander McCall Smith’s latest novel, ‘Cordoruy Mansions’ on line and was struck on this freezing cold, wet and windy day in N.Ireland, as I read this: ‘The British certainly lived in conditions of great discomfort, with their cold, draughty homes and their admiration for a culture of cold showers. But did they actually like to be uncomfortable, or did they accept discomfort as a constant factor in British life, like bad weather and run-down trains?’ Can anyone answer this for me?

You may want to read this and consider how best to respond. Pauline

Last September, I blogged about our reverse culture shock and wondered how long it would take us to feel at home here. I talked about some of the ways we knew we weren’t at home (and others must have known too!) – see blog entitled ‘Culture shock – in reverse?’.

Now, a year later, we are feeling more and more at home – but what does that look like?

Well, we know our way round a bit better (I now can find all three supermarkets in our home town).

We are tempted to drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road less often (that’s a good thing).

Now we turn our heads when we hear French spoken.

We are aware of fewer gaps in the girls’ spoken English (I even heard one of them talking about ‘the dole’ the other day – until a year ago that meant a mountain top near where we lived in Switzerland!).

We enjoy the ease of having a carry-out (or is it a take-away?).

We are becoming more accustomed to the ‘banter’ that is such a way of life here.

Words like ‘diaper’ and ‘vacation’ and ‘pacifier’ have dropped from our vocabularies (having been added for the sake of ease in conversing with our American friends in Switzerland) – though I must admit I still do think twice when someone asks me if I want to ‘nurse’ their baby!

We are getting used to starting the day later than 6.30am and finishing it later than 9.30pm – though how much of that has to do with having teenage girls?

We are certainly getting used to phoning (not ‘calling’) people and having them phone us later than 9.30pm without automatically thinking it’s an emergency.

It’s interesting how many of these adjustments have had to do with language. I can now use the word ‘coup’ (or is that cowp?) freely in a sentence without having to explain what it means!

But just in case we are tempted to forget our ‘American’ or ‘international’ English, we have had several visitors here to help us keep it fresh. And we have even had the chance to use our French, firstly when Alan and I had the pleasure of escorting the President of Burundi and his entourage at the Franklin Graham event, and then when some Swiss friends visited us earlier in the summer.

Aaaah! the summer! Now, that is something we miss! The weather here is not quite what it was in Switzerland. We are certainly realizing why it is a constant topic of conversation – because it changes constantly. There is an old saying that if you are in Ireland and you don’t like the weather, wait a minute. It’s true that it changes all the time and it’s also true that we get lots of rain (see Alan’s blog about our weekend floods).

But then we didn’t come home for the weather…..