I discovered recently that there are whole playlists of sad Christmas songs. Sometimes they are actually sad (I’m looking with heart eyes at Sia’s “Snowman”) and some just sound sad (Sarah Mclaughlin’s Wintersong Album). Either way, I am here for it.
For my entire life, I have had a prayer habit. For my entire life, I have also been afraid of God. Not the fear full of awe. The distrustful fear of a person who has been hurt.
The God I was introduced to was never satisfied with me just the way I was. I assumed if I prayed for guidance, that when God answered, it would be with a demand for change on my part. Never mind that when I’ve actually asked for and received guidance, the most clear and meaningful messages I got were those of reassurance and acceptance.
I’m thinking of a woman I passed on my way into the grocery store with an aggressively bad side shave – I’ve seen the look before, it’s usually a kind of buzzed or shaved rectangle over one ear with the rest of the hair left long.
Any week, I could begin to tell you how I’m doing by saying I’ve been striving, and each week it would be no less true than the one before.
Today, many times, my eighteen year old son flew past the house on his motorized scooter wearing slides and no helmet, doing wheelies in the rain. I debated internally whether to call out to him to put a helmet on, and maybe proper shoes. He is of age, and he knows how I feel about safety.
I didn’t say anything.
Most people have heard the line from the Bible about loving your neighbor as yourself. If you don’t know the rest of the story, in the biblical context, everyone is your neighbor.
Here are three good books unified around a theme of neighbors and how we treat ours. These books contain big T truth – the Truth that comes through in any medium where there is space for it to dwell.
