A Photographer's Glance
New Year’s Eve
A year ago
One date, not so innocent,
Three kids, one hotel, one persistent intrusion,
Followed a few days later with one accusation,
That was impossible,
And now,
What is, is all the result of one be-devilled
Let’s see one year further into the future
And hope the same is bettered with hope
And persistent work to let Grace prevail!
There are cracks in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
There are some things that should not be done.
There are some things that should be done.
Catching light whenever possible should be done.
One shot.
Two shot.
Blaming others for the darkness that
one has chosen for oneself should not be done.
No shot.
Doesn’t depend on anything,
If you live in a darkness that you chose,
then blaming others just buries it under more darkness …
until the light is obliterated and
there is no more hope for light or love or life …
nor joy.
Until God chooses to change you!
And then there is life in abundance!
That’s Grace!
There are times in ones life when the beauty of it all is overwhelming.
When, through the cracks in everything, the light gets in …
and the light that brings life shines all around in the darkness, giving life.
Choose life, please, choose life.
And this from the supper table, piped into a fantastic sound system:
and this article as an explanation: Isreal records in one take
Tonight:
Last Saturday, Christmas, I put this together from pieces from my wife and my thoughts and my wife then edited a few times. And it contains the essence of faith; Faith in a gracious God; Faith proclaimed by our church, the Lutheran Church, the E.L.C.I.C.:
Second Reading: Titus 3:4-7
4When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. 6This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Darkness
We wrote to a friend whose wife, Joan, was diagnosed with a really bad kind of dementia:
“Today, as the snow falls on the still dark fields in the view to the west and as single cars traverse the road on this side of the darker trees,
“I’m thinking of you and all the inspiration you have been to us;
“And thinking how [deleted expletive/]unfair and typical it is that you must face this, as you’ve faced so many challenges.”
Christmas Works
Every Christmas we see people, people, people expecting, expecting, expecting, buying, buying, buying, preparing, preparing, preparing, travelling, travelling, travelling, doing, doing, doing, cooking, cooking, cooking, wrapping, wrapping, wrapping, eating, eating, eating, and then we also see people grouchy and pressed, ornery and mean, exhausted and worn, hurting and torn, hungry in body and soul, upset and disappointed, disappointed, disappointed.
Christmas Grace according to God’s Mercy
God comes into our stress and hectic, joins right in with us, walks with us, runs with us to the store, the bedroom to wrap, the kitchen to cook, the living room to deliver, the drive to shovel, the store for the last minute food or gift, … God is with us, and the greatest gift is not any of our hectic, or our doing, or our meeting expectations, or even our great goodness.
Christmas is God’s Gift to us, to remind us: God is WITH us in everything: there is nothing we can do to make God be with us. God has done this already, and demonstrated it with Jesus’ birth more than 2 millennia ago. Demonstrated it because we humans need it made real obvious.
The rest of the world, even other religions and the Christian churches, and even us Lutherans get so lost in trying to be in control that we preach, teach and live that we need to do the righteous things, that we need to say the righteous things, that we need to believe the righteous things,
All in order that God will be with us.
That’s a formula for disaster in our lives. It is the formula of sin: we take over the place of God … and then all hell breaks loose in and around us, and we wonder why.
But the one True Gift that the Lutheran Church offers our members, the rest of the Christian churches, other religions, and all the world is simple:
First we confess: We cannot make ourselves right with God. We are too far gone, lost to sin, even the seemingly ‘smallest’ sin separates us from God. And we JUST CANNOT DO IT RIGHTEOUS enough, none of us, never, ever, no how!
AND
Second we proclaim: we don’t have to make ourselves righteous enough, because God has already made us saints, even as we are and remain sinners. God COMES TO US, each of us. Though we are lost, God finds us every day, every hour, every second. God finds us, comes to us, and God is with us,
Always. God is with us, God makes us good enough to be in God’s presence! It’s a gift! Free!
And the only thing we can do is respond: we don’t have to respond well, but we can. Knowing God is with us can change our lives, what we think, what we say, what we DO, and what we believe. And God IS with us no matter how we respond! Its grace, its free, its life-giving.
Giving as Giving Life; Because God Gives, Therefore We Give
Knowing God is with us can change our lives: we can give freely just as God gives to us, we can give forgiveness and mercy, grace and hope: love! WE can give others unconditional love!!
Story: Giving Freely
Nancy Gavin tells the story of her husband, Mike, whom she refers to as “The Man Who Hated Christmas.” Now it wasn’t Jesus that Mike hated. It wasn’t the Christian faith that he hated. But Mike hated what our culture had done with Christmas. He hated trees, and he hated presents, he hated “Jingle Bells,” and he hated all that stuff.
And he was a grouch every year at Christmas–not because of Jesus and the manger but because of the way we observe it.
One December when their son, Kevin, was twelve years old, Kevin was wrestling on his Junior High Wrestling Team. During that month of December they had an exhibition match against a church team. [A] church team … from … the inner city, a team made up of the poorest of the poor …. When the day came for the wrestling match, Kevin and his team came out in their sparkling wrestling uniforms…. [E]verything was as high tech and glorious as it could be. The [other] team … came with sneakers that weren’t really wrestling sneakers. …they didn’t even have the helmets that wrestlers wear to protect their ears from being pinched and pulled and scraped [while] wrestling.
As the match progressed … the church team [lost] every match. Mike… leaned over to [Nancy] and said, “I wish they could win just one match. They have talent, but they don’t have any coaching.”… [It took some doing but somehow] a light bulb went off in Nancy’s head.
The very next day she went down to the local sporting goods store and bought wrestling headgear and wrestling shoes and sent them anonymously to the church whose team her son had wrestled the day before. Then on Christmas Eve she wrote a little note to Mike: “Dear Mike, I know how you feel about Christmas. … Remember that wrestling team from the inner city church? This Christmas, they have headgear and proper shoes … as your Christmas present.”
She put the note in an envelope and stuck the envelope up in the branches of their Christmas tree. When morning came, the children unwrapped all their presents, and there was the usual festivity. Then one of the children spotted this envelope up in the tree and said, “Look! What is that?” Mike took the envelope down and opened it and read the note. With tears in his eyes, he looked at Nancy and said, “This is the best Christmas that I have ever had.”
It became a tradition in their family. Every year there would be an envelope, with no name on it, just an envelope in the tree. One year Nancy sent a group of mentally challenged kids to camp. Another year she sent some funds to a family whose house had burned down during the month of December. Year after year after year some sort of gift like this was Mike’s Christmas present.
Then, Nancy wrote, there came the fall, about the time their children were grown, when Mike died of cancer. When Christmas rolled around, Nancy could hardly put up the tree. But she did, and somehow in his memory she felt that she ought to once again put an envelope in the tree to make some sort of gift in Mike’s honor, just as she had during his lifetime. The three grown children came home, and Christmas morning came. And there in the branches of the tree were four envelopes. For, unbeknownst to each other, each of their three children had also made a gift in honor of their father.
And that too has become a tradition in their home. Nancy Gavin writes, “For generations … as my children become adults and have their own families, there will be an envelope for Mike in their tree.” And when her grandchildren have families of their own, there will probably still be envelopes for Mike in their tree. For the Gavin family is a family that “got it.” …. (SERMONSHOP December 1999, JOE PARRISH)
They began to understand Christmas, God’s gift of life for us.
Giving as Works
But our giving gifts at Christmas, not even an envelope in Mike’s memory, is not supposed to be our way to earn love from others, or from God. It is supposed to be BECAUSE we love them, and we love them because God loves us first, even though we do not deserve it, never, ever, no how.
Giving as Response to Mercy, to Grace
This Christmas, not in order to gain anything from God, nor from others, but because we recognize all that God has given us, let us Give to others. Give something just because God loves you, accepts you as you are, forgives you, and because God walks with you.
Christmas Grace
But whether you give because God loves you unconditionally, OR NOT; whether you are caught up in the hectic of making it perfect so that the traditions are not lost and are there as a loving structure that gives life to you and yours, OR NOT; whether you have quit giving gifts and you hate Christmas, OR NOT; whether you love the snow and the possibilities of the Christmas season, OR NOT; whether you have or will give all the right gifts to all the right people, OR NOT;
NO Matter What: God walks with you each day, each hour, each minute, and loves you unconditionally.
Christmas Light
We ended that note to our friend with these words:
“As the light of Christmas dawns, and the details become clearer, of the landscape before us, it is with deep gratitude for your gifts, part of God’s gifts for us, that we say,
“Know we pray for you and Joan,
“Know that if you need whatever, we will find it, in ourselves or organize it with others, to provide for you, as you have provided for so many people, us included.
“May the light shine even now brightly for you and Joan.”
Christmas Blessing
Breathe easy; you’re in God’s hands also this day. So let God’s light of love shine through your heart, mind and soul to all those around you.
Have a blessed Christmas!
Amen
While watching efforts to regain art, the Woman in Gold,
which was stolen by the Nazis,
a gingerbread house is being constructed.
Hope.
Where is the wrong in what was originally private,
then stolen by the Nazis,
and now a national treasure of the Austrian government,
except for it to be taken away from Austria, private again
in a new homeland.
Where is the wrong …
Where is the wrong in cutting off the children?
That’s raw hope, nothing in the world points to that ever being the case.
But that is hope, to hope for what the world provides no evidence as possible at the time.
The Day of Christmas is quite full of expectations and little leaves one wondering if one can meet the expectations more than taking seriously what could be.
Flowers are not complicated.
They add a flair of hope.
That one day, things will be as they should be.
I have built things my whole life, since early on up to and including tomorrow.
The greatest rewards come from building something that allows someone else, or even myself, to be able to do something they are not able to do, or to do it more safely or more efficiently.
I built spreadsheets for my ex-common-law wife’s store. It was terrific to take a process that she or others had spent half an hour to numerous hours, repeatedly (daily, weekly, monthly) and automate the process so that it happened instantaneously or after only a few minutes of copying and pasting. The first thing I did was I took the staff schedule and put in formulas to total the hours worked each day, and a subtotal for each week, and a total for every two week pay period. Gone were the hours spent calculating hours worked every payday.
I took the requirements for sick leave accumulated and taken, built a spreadsheet, and just by entering a staff person’s start up information, their first day of benefits, and then any day they took as sick leave, we would have an accurate record of whether they were entitled to sick leave taken, and how many days they had remaining.
One of the last things I did was I took that schedule/payroll spreadsheet and automated another spreadsheet to read the last nine weeks of schedules to calculate out Holiday Pay for each statutory holiday. That got interrupted so many times, and there were so many odd things to take into account, that it took me the longest to finish, nearly six months. But when I left it worked like a charm.
The second biggest thing I did was take the End of Day reporting process, eliminate the need to print and then re-enter figures for the day into other spreadsheets, and took the process for one staff person who used it the most from a 35 minute process to a 12 minute process each evening. And it exposed all sorts of errors in the software generated numbers, usually an error in communication between two pieces of software, but also all sorts of errors made at the till; and it made it possible within minutes of finding and fixing the problem to verify that the error was fixed correctly. Before these errors simply went undetected … and lost the business hundreds of dollars.
The biggest thing I did was build a very large spreadsheet that updated costs, set prices, discounts, and various other details for items sold in the store. It was more complicated than anything else I’d done and I barely got a chance to use it to set prices.
That’s a story for later.
So what’s this all about now?!
With the right tool, creative imagination, and hard work it is amazing what can be done!
And this tool is amazing. I’m able to make cuts accurate down to a 64th of an inch! And more than that … well the sander barely has to do anything to even those variations out!
So this helped produce another desk, this one for my second oldest son. Build just right to fit his cramped room and his computer use … and the ability to get the desk up the tight stairwell to his room. So it’s assembled mostly like the others with glue and finishing nails, but some crucial joints, including attaching the desktops, are screwed in place. So it can be finished, oiled, dried and let the smell dissipate, and then disassembled, carried upstairs and reassembled in place.
The right tools, the right imagination, and good work!