Birthday Celebrations!

 

I had a blessed 24th birthday on Monday this week and enjoyed a couple celebrations with friends. On Friday night, my two friends from church took me out to dinner at Sante, the restaurant I enjoyed with my parents back in February. We ordered a Fromage plate to share with three kinds of cheese, salami, homemade mustard, apple-cherry preserve, candied walnuts, raisins, and slices of baguette. My main dish was ravioli stuffed with pork confit (con-fee) and apple cream cheese and covered with a mushroom crema sauce. Delicious! We finished up with bread pudding that had a homemade marshmallow to the side and butterscotch sauce drizzled over the top. The atmosphere of Sante and conversation made for a wonderful evening! Thanks Cindy and Becca!

 

On Sunday evening, I had the pleasure of cooking my mom's wonderful lasagna for several of my friends and housemates. We talked about our alter-egos at the dinner table, and then went out for Froyo. You don't want to know what was on my Peanut Butter/Birthday Cake frozen yogurt. Let's just say I have a high sugar tolerance. :)

 

My co-worker Emily and I joke that we're the same person because people call her Elizabeth and me Emily. We sometimes call ourselves Emily Elizabeth, like the owner of Clifford, the books about the big, red dog. So, as a present, Emily crocheted this adorable mini-Clifford for me: 

 

 

On Monday, I left work early and drove up to Trader Joe's (next two pictures). Call me crazy, but I simply love looking around that store. I didn't even get a ton of exciting stuff, just chicken breasts (which are currently in my Crock-Pot with onions, salsa, and taco seasoning), bacon, Fontina cheese, Roasted Red Pepper Spread with Eggplant and Garlic on the recommendation of a friend, Yogurt O's Strawberry Cereal, and a bouquet of flowers. I was having trouble getting my face, the flowers, and the Trader Joe's sign in the picture without blinding myself (the sun was bright!), so this is the best picture you'll get: 

 

I love having fresh flowers in the house again! My co-worker got me the Nutter Butters as a present. It's peanut butter. Enough said!

 

My housemate Pam made me this lovely sign and hung it above our front door. It's so great! It was the first thing I saw when I walked upstairs at 6 AM on Monday.

My housemate started her first day of a new job on Monday, so to celebrate doubly, my housemates Pam (left), Justina (right), and I went to a taco truck for dinner. We got a simply delicious burrito with marinated pork and onions and nachos with ground beef. It was delicious!

 

My co-worker bought me a bag of candy Princess jewelry with two necklaces, two rings, two lipsticks, and a bracelet with a "diamond." She said I'm the Party-Planning Princess at work, so I needed appropriate accessories. I put the ring on my finger and almost had to eat it off. Oops! A bunch of us in the office also love Downton Abbey, so she got me this awesome t-shirt! If you're Downton-Abbey literate, you'll know that Mr. Carson is a black-and-white, toe-the-line butler who also has a good heart. :)

 

We had our April birthday celebration at work and one of my co-workers brought this enormous, pizza-sized cookie! It was quite the sight! We also had brownies, a Mexican dip with chips, and fruit. I was a little sugared out at dinner, so I ate salad, roasted asparagus, and roasted cauliflower leftovers and a bowl of Strawberry Yogurt O's for dinner. Yum!

 

 

Overall, my birthday was a delight. However, in light of the bombings in Boston that happened on my birthday, I realized and continue to reflect on how grateful I am for the gift of life and for the gift of so many friends and family who have made my twenty-four years full of joy. Thank you! Life is precious, and I pray that we're each able to embrace life with the joy and courage given to us through Jesus Christ. 

An Imperfect Christmas



On the Colbert women's retreat a couple weeks ago, one of the speakers confessed the tension caused when she wishes for a perfect Christmas. She wants the house to be perfectly clean, all the shopping done, cookies baked for each of her four children, and the list goes on. She deftly exposed the stark paradox of contemporary American Christmas. A holiday with the humblest of origins has become a rat race for who can have the biggest, the best, the most expensive, and the most together Christmas.

 

Perhaps this is why A Charlie Brown Christmas is so endearing to us. It presents imperfection candidly. This is also why I love the book The Best Christmas Pagent Ever by Barbara Robinson (please, please read it if you haven't!). What turns out in both movie and book to be nearly disastrous is actually the source of the most poignant Christmas truths. Who can forget Linus' recitation of the Christmas story? Who can overlook the tears of Imogene Herdman as she holds baby Jesus?

 

At Christmas, I love sorting through the boxes of ornaments my parents, sister, and I have collected over the years. Each one carries a memory of a beloved friend or family member. Over Thanksgiving, I picked out a four-foot tree from my grandpa's Christmas Tree Farm and drove it back to Spokane with a box full of my ornaments. One ornament in particular was destined for the prime spot on my small, Charlie-Brownish tree:    

 

 

As I was shopping at Target between Thanksgiving and now, I saw lots of gaudy Christmas-tree toppers, and I disliked them all. My grandpa, the Christmas tree farm owner, made me this rough, wood-hewn star and spray-painted it this bronzy-gold color. Its hook is fashioned from a piece of spare wire that came from my grandpa's shop. Besides the fact that my grandpa made this ornament for me, I love it because it's imperfect. It's just wood. It's not shiny or flashy. It reminds me of the manger and the scared parents and the cold night and the smelly animals. My star is perfect even with its imperfections.

 

It reminds me that Jesus' birth was perfect even with its imperfections, too. And with the reality of God Incarnate, who is free from sin, we're forced to embrace humility and imperfection while clinging to the fact that the only imperfection Jesus embraces is ours.   

 

**

 

On Sunday, I joined a group of adults and kids from Colbert on a Christmas caroling trip. We visited a number of homebound seniors from our church community. There were lots of imperfections about our caroling trip. We tracked in mud on a white carpet. The 10-year-old violin player was squeaky. We were several keys above our normal singing range. The bodies of the people we visited are failing.

 

But somehow our ragtag group still proclaimed the Christmas message. And perhaps proclaimed it better because we joined the legions of stories, experiences, hymns, and Gospel truths that tell of the real reason Christmas is best with a little imperfection. I believe Charles Wesley says it best: "Hark! The Herald angels sing. Glory to the newborn king! Peace on earth and mercy mild. God and sinners reconciled."

 

May this Christmas be one in which you embrace the perfect love of a God who chooses to embrace our fumbling imperfections, bronzy gold paint, rough edges, squeaky voices, and all.

How Merciful You Are, Lord

How merciful you are, Lord, that you forgive us our sins, all our sins.

Teach us the merciful art of public and private confession,

not for our shame but for the cleansing of our sins

and the fallowing of our rough hearts.

Amen.

 

 



To Love Is To Be

Two of my housemates moved out this week and another will move out on Sunday. They're all moving far away: Los Angeles, Princeton, New Jersey, Denver. It seemed appropriate that I stumbled across this quote on a friend's blog:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one...Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

C.S. Lewis' insights are always astute, even poignant.

Astute observations are also why I appreciate my pastor. He preached on Ephesians 3:14-21 this past Sunday where Paul prays that the Ephesians may be filled with "all the fullness of God" (19). I imagine Paul knew a thing or two about saying goodbye to people. He spent at least two years in Ephesus and writes beautiful prayers on behalf of the Ephesians. Paul wants them to fully comprehend the "love of Christ that surpasses knowledge."

In his sermon, my pastor explored what the fullness of God might look like. He said he had always assumed that God's fullness meant blessings and good and prosperity. But if we look at the life of Christ, there is also hardship and betrayal and anger and grief. Since Christ embodied the fullness of God in human form, my pastor concluded that for our lives to overflow with the fullness of God we must also embrace "every emotion on the continuum of the human experience," joy, sorrow and everything in between.

I just noticed in the verse that the fullness of God is fundamentally rooted in love. Paul prays that we will "know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God." We won't be filled with the fullness of God until we know the love of Christ.

And, ironically, love invites brokenness. The love of Christ ended in death.

Brokenness hardly ever seems like fullness. I'm always surprised when love ends in grief, in separation, in sacrifice. I expect love to be easy, to fix all the problems. But human love will never do that. And yet somehow, even as humans, we experience the fullness of God when we embrace love-giving-way-to-brokenness.

And ultimately, this is the only way we can know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. This is the only way we will be filled with all the fullness of God.

Because someday brokenness will give way to love.

And we will meet the Source of Love himself.