Christmas Break in Review

The kids are going back to school today. *sniff* Four months into this new way of life and I haven't yet figured out why parents complain about school holidays. I enjoyed ours and look forward to the next...in less than two weeks. Though that will only be a four day weekend.

At any rate, here's some pics from our break.

The last day of school was free dress, and a half-day. The kids love free dress...well, except Spock. He finds free dress days, um, illogical. He ended up wearing most of his uniform, he just had a different shirt on...which you can't see coz it's under his school jacket here. :D

So, after just a few hours, we were off for the holidays...almost. We had a few things to take care of first. Like Santa.

Yeah, I let it go down to the wire this year. Never again. Though it worked just fine, I still don't want to be standing in line outside BassPro on Saturday morning before Christmas.

After Santa, and lunch, we were off to the theater for three more shows of Nutcracker.

In between, Braniac got to sing at church, which always makes him happy. He's looking forward to first grade when he can be in the children's choir. B is on the front row, right, second one in, red sweater vest, yawning, puts the blanket over his head...

And then it was time to get ready for Christmas. Made pie this year. We've never found a gluten-free pre-made crust that we all like so I made mine from scratch. Turned out pretty good. Now Braniac wants me to make him a chocolate pie. :)

6am, Christmas Eve morning, where were you? I was at Toys R Us, in the rain, with Mr. Great-heart who was spending his birthday and Christmas money on his brothers. Yeah, he's that awesome. He also always buys people gifts with his AWANA bucks and his Space Rewards (Sunday School) money. You wish you had a kid this awesome. ;)

Christmas Eve also happens to be Mr. Great-heart's birthday. He wanted to ride a train so we loaded our cupcakes and were off to the train station to wait...and boy did we wait.

When people ask why public transportation isn't more popular, unreliability is probably a great answer. Almost 45 minutes late. We missed our return connection. But it all worked out for the best...no, actually, it didn't. Due to us having to take a later train, Babycakes didn't vomit on the carpet at home, he vomited all over me in the train. I think Metrolink should give me a free pass for making sure he only puked on me instead of their seats. :D

Christmas Eve.

Writing our thank you to Santa.

5am Christmas morning. Well, at least they don't come in and jump all over the bed. :)

Last year of going overboard. Next year we have a limit. 

But at least they know what's important. :)

We took it easy most of the time. Recovering from Nutcracker and our first four months of going to school. I took the kids to the farm a few times. Here's Braniac's first day. (I didn't tell him what those nice cattle we fed the weeds to were for...he'd probably never go back.)

On NYD we went out to San Pedro to see the USS Iowa. Very impressive. We'll have to go back in about five years to see how far along they've come in making their museum.

The Teenager turned 16. No pics, he's allergic to the camera. But here's the food we ate.

For the closing ceremonies we had a nice rainstorm. This had been a double rainbow but by the time I found my camera and got out front this was all that was left.

...but sometimes I'm just obnoxious.

We conservatives are nothing if not obsessed with the 1950's. I don't really know why  except that somewhere in our minds we have it locked in there that after the 1950's everything went to, well, you know. I started thinking about this as Spock and I were conversing about the plight of the inner city. He wanted to know how it got to be so bad. I stated the usual "soft-on-crime" stats, government corruption, etc., then I suddenly remembered something I don't think about a lot...white flight. I had to explain to him that when people who weren't white were allowed to move into white neighborhoods, the whites sold off their properties at below market value just to get away from them driving down the value of the neighborhoods and opening it up to abuse. He looked at me kinda funny. I told him that in the "good old days" at least a third of the people in his school, would not have been allowed to go to his school. In the "good old days" one of his best friends couldn't have been his friend. I didn't go further and explain that he would have been taught to hate the boy as well based solely on the boys skin color.

Ah, yes, the fabulous '50s. Life was so much better then. Everything was neat and clean. We all knew our place and stayed there. There was no messy-ness to life. As my grandmother says, "Phooey."

This reminds me of my view of my childhood with my grandparents. But, in this case, instead of the suppression of the bad memories being a good thing, it's a white-wash. Have these people been watching too much classic TV? The '50s were lousy. Sure there were some good things, there are always good things in each generation, but the fact that non-whites were treated and viewed as less than human because of their skin color should make anyone with sense take what they can from the era, and leave it in the past. Who really wants to go back to the "good old days?" Was life really better when the only people who could get anywhere in life were rich white men? The '50s did bring about a more middle class lifestyle...mostly for whites, but the problems were huge and to ignore them and hearken back to those days as the days we wish were still here, well, I just think it's kind of foolish coz we always have to qualify it with "but not the racial stuff." What else was there? Was there something bigger going on?

I've stated before, somewhere but I can't remember which post, that we have to have something to hate. It is human nature. In the 50s we hated people who were a different skin color. Now we hate people who dress differently than we do. Seriously, we do. Yesterday I was at Trader Joe's and there were five boys in the parking lot. they had their stupid pants hanging down around their hips and the whole world could see their undies. I just rolled my eyes and shook my head and wondered when this ridiculous fashion would end. But this morning I wonder something different. I wonder, if it hadn't been the grocery store parking lot, but instead the church parking lot, or better, the church lobby, what would I have thought? If the five boys were to walk into your church tomorrow morning, what would happen? I have been to churches where the unthinkable would happen. They would be told, maybe in not so many words, that they were simply not welcome here unless they would hike up their pants, change their hair, cover their tats, and remove their piercings.

While we've come a far way from the racism that plagued human history up to this day, are we not just transferring our hate to another group...any group that is different from us?

Jesus sat and ate with the dirty people. The clean religious people looked down on Him. They still do. Every time we judge someone based on their appearance, every time we forget, or in some cases absolutely refuse, to see people as in need of our Savior instead of in need of a hair cut or 1950s style clothing we step into Pharisee-ism.

Jesus did not say faith, hope and fashion, the greatest of these is fashion.

It's not an easy change to make. Obviously, I still slip back into it easily enough. But when we do, I hope we can remind ourselves just how easy it is to hate. Anyone can hate. We need to love to be considered different from the world around us. To do this we need encouragement from our pastors and Sunday School teachers. If we are listening to sermons that seem to be sound in doctrine but inevitably must include some sort of jibe or sarcastic remark about people we disagree with, can we really say the pastor is encouraging us to love? If our Sunday School teachers can't have a conversation without dragging the name of someone who disagrees with them on any issue through the mud, can we say that we will not go and do likewise? When we place ourselves under the influence of leaders who hate (I know, they never call it that) we put ourselves at risk. Always remember, we are the monkeys in "monkey see, monkey do."

I'll close, finally ;), with the words of Christ from the passage that still scares me to death...though not now because I fear that I am one of the latter, but because of how close I came to being one of the latter (there but for the Grace of God...). "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."  Are we too busy keeping ourselves safe from the "riff-raff" to do what Christ has commanded us?

Five Minute Friday: Opportunity

"We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situation." Charles Swindoll

If Pastor Swindoll is right, and I believe he is, my life could best be described as one long, continuous missed opportunity. Because when opportunity came, I sat around and complained about it. To grant myself grace, and to give it to those reading, we weren't raised to do much different. Complaining is, in all honesty, the world-wide pastime  To get political, if we really want to identify what the problem is with our nation, our world, it's that when the going gets tough, most of us get to whining. Most of us were raised to believe that when bad things happen, we should spend a lot of time complaining about it. Some of us can even bring up memories from decades ago and complain with the same ferocity as we did then. I've come to see that my view on this is not just erroneous, it is what keeps me from living the life God has planned for me. As I look back, how much better would it have been if I'd tried to find the good in the bad. Now, I know, this is easy for me. I'm naturally a positive person who was raised by negative people so it's easy for me to convert to my nature. But if what Scripture says is true, that God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust, then if we sit around complaining when it does, how different are we from the world? We are called to be salt and light, and the best times to do that is when the people around us are keeping tabs on our behavior, namely, when our rains come.

2012 in Review

It's difficult to write a review of the year without certain people drawing the conclusion that I am being vindictive or snarky. I am being neither, just jotting down some thoughts on the past year and how far we've come from where we were.

It's been a year since we returned from Hume Lake and, by unspoken agreement, made Pomona First Baptist our church home. It wasn't even something that had to be discussed. We'd been to the dark side and found that, indeed, they'd lied about the cookies, so we had no intention of ever returning to it. PFB was more than the logical conclusion, it had become painfully obvious that it was where God wanted us. To disobey Him in this again was sure to bring us even more pain.

Though we know this is where God has placed us, it has not been a seamless transition. There have been some very rocky roads. There have been some severely dark times. But this time, none of these could be attributed to the church or its leadership. It was (and is) our stuff that we need to work out in light of the Truth of the Gospel. It's rocky because this is foreign to us. Viewing things in light of Scripture. Learning to be obedient to His word, not just when we feel like it. Learning that God is a God of Love, and trying to change our mindset to become more like Him, to offer people compassion and understanding instead of judgement.

It hasn't hurt, though, that we do not walk around in constant defeat, with the feeling that God didn't really care what happened to us coz all He cares about is us getting our theology perfect. There was a time when I couldn't see that this was the type of church we were in. There was a time when I'd have said that having perfect theology wasn't a false gospel of works. Knowing that God does indeed care about His children, loves us more than we can imagine, and, important to this understanding, being in a church that lives that out, has been tremendously helpful.

When I was a girl I lived on my grandparents' farm in Montana. Every day was a day of perfect bliss. Nothing ever went wrong like it had in the home of my abusive parents....um, not exactly. There were problems, even with my grandparents who loved me. I had all my baggage from my childhood *and* I was a teenager. I can't really remember a lot of it any more, though. I remember being loved. That's all I know. I went from living in fear to knowing I was safe. The only demons around me were the ones I carried.

It is the same today when I look back at 2012. There were so many things that were terrible. Most of which will never make the public record. It was a year of struggles and pain and suffering by everyone in this house. But I don't remember it like that. I was saved. My life began to be changed. When I look back at the year I feel only a sense of peace and God's presence with me, an anticipation and excitement of what He will do this year. The pain is something I have to force myself to remember, not live in denial of, or spend most of my time trying to forget.

As I write this out a song comes to mind...surprise. :D Jeremy Camp's "Let it Fade" seems an appropriate description...

Because of the nature of the life we have left I feel compelled to remind those certain people that just because I know I have rest in my Savior doesn't mean I am blind to the fact that life is difficult. It just makes those difficulties a thousand times more easy to deal with. When you give your life to Christ, when God gets a hold of you, He changes everything about you. The end result is not that you have less problems, but that He helps you through them. Which is better, continue to go it alone? Or rest in the knowledge that He will bring you through?

The Lord has given us new life, a hope and a future. 2013 promises to bring more trials and problems, it is the nature of living in this fallen world, but now I know God is on my side, He will be with me through it all. I may not always be happy, in fact, shouldn't always be happy, I will sometimes doubt and question, I am probably never going to react to things perfectly, but I will always find rest, forgiveness, hope, and peace in Him regardless what happens.

I Resolve...

Wow, am I behind in my posting. It's a long, emotional story, involving the loss of hundreds of vacation photos right after our trip to San Diego at Thanksgiving. *sigh* Anyway, suffice to say, I've not felt like posting pictures, though I do have a few (thank goodness I have a camera as well as a phone).

But here we are at a new year and, well, I don't really know, except that I wanted to post about resolutions and all that. I have a few. They are at one of my other blogs (what can I say, I need to compartmentalize my life), this one I started when The Teenager decided he wanted to learn to homestead. (As an aside, I am officially calling this "unschooling" to take away the stigma of "drop-out." :/)

At any rate, I have a few resolutions. Other than those listed on the other blog, I also want to read entirely through the bible. Will be using M'Cheyne's plan. I've got it all printed out and put into my resolution binder. I was pretty set, as you can see, until I went to church last night. As we sang this hymn I became convicted that, while all these are "good" things, they leave out something more important.

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;

Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art

Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,

Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;

I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;

Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;

Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight;

Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight;

Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tower:

Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,

Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:

Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,

High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

High King of Heaven, my victory won,

May I reach Heaven’s joys, O bright Heaven’s Sun!

Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,

Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

Words: Dallan Forgail (8th Century)

The Lord is to be my everything. 

In the sermon the pastor mentioned an adage I'd heard before about the good getting in the way of the great. What I want to do is good. But I had forgotten what was great. To spend a year working and praying to change my mindset will be a great thing.