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Meditations on Christmas

December 24th, 2008 by witherow

Merry Christmas, everyone!

 

Today’s post is going to be a little different, meaning it’s actually going to be about something, instead of me just blathering on about raisin armies or whatever it is I talk about on here.

 

That’s because Christmas always makes me more meditative. The thoughts I’m meditating on this Christmas are twofold: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light,” and “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

 

The people that walked in darkness …

In preparing for A Jerusalem Story, I did some reading about the historical setting in which Christ was born. It wasn’t the cute pastoral land so many children’s nativity plays would have us believe. Israel in the first century was a violent, unstable political landscape. When Herod the Great took power, he massacred Jews by the masses, including women, children, refugees. And he didn’t hesitate to murder anyone who was a threat to his throne, real or imagined, including several members of his own family.

 

But the terrors of Herod were nothing compared with what was still coming. In a few decades, the Romans would crush the Jewish Zealot revolt and Jerusalem would be devastated. The Temple would be torn down, stone by stone, and perhaps a million people would die, many brutally.

 

God’s people lived in the shadow of death.

 

But there was still Hope.

 

Simeon, a somewhat mysterious character in the Nativity account, waited for this Hope with his last breath. T.S. Eliot, one of my favorite poets, captures a little bit of what this might have been like in his masterful “Song for Simeon.” Here’s just a part of it (go read the rest; it’s amazing): 

 

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.
According to thy word 

 

In these darkest of times, God did not forget His people, but came to suffer with them, for them. 

 

“The people who walked in darkness
      Have seen a great light;
      Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,
      Upon them a light has shined. …

For unto us a Child is born,
      Unto us a Son is given;
      And the government will be upon His shoulder.
      And His name will be called
      Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
      Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

And the Word became flesh …

My second thought is the whole mystery of Christmas, the great paradox of the Incarnation. How could the Immortal put on mortality? How could the Word that spoke the world into existence be given an infant’s babbling tongue? How can the life-sustaining Creator become a creature, and one that needed a mother to feed Him, rock Him to sleep and keep Him warm? How can He be both God and man—at the same time?

It’s a mind-bending paradox, one that we will never understand but can always kneel and wonder at.

Mark Lowry reflects this mystery in “Mary, Did You Know?”: 

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will calm the storm with His hand?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy has walked where angels trod?
When you kiss your little Baby you kissed the face of God?

 

But I think John Rutter captures it the best in his lovely “Candlelight Carol”: 

 

Shepherds and wise men will kneel and adore Him
Seraphim round Him their vigil will keep
Nations proclaim Him their Lord and their Saviour
But Mary will hold Him
And sing Him to sleep

 

 

Find him at Bethlehem laid in a manger
Christ our Redeemer asleep in the hay
Godhead incarnate and hope of salvation
A Child with His mother that first Christmas day

 

 

How great a mystery. How great a love, that He would come to dwell among us, knowing He would be unrecognized, dishonored, persecuted, killed. For us.

 

Gloria in excelsis Deo. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.

Merry Christmas.

 
 
 
 

 

 

 

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Ask not for whom the bell chingeth …

December 13th, 2008 by witherow

Well, here I am. My church’s Christmas play, A Jerusalem Story, will be performed tomorrow morning. After a months of researching, writing, gathering props, learning how to direct and act at the same time, and ordering fake beards online, I just won’t know what to do with my time once it’s all over.

Wait, I just remembered. I will sleep.

A lot.

Until like March.

In all seriousness, I am excited how God has allowed everything to come together, even when I doubted this all would work. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not about the acting or the set or the fake beards (which I am SO glad I don’t have to wear) — it’s about showing a little glimpse of how wonderful Christ really is. Soli Deo gloria.

Midway Bible Church doesn’t always do a drama at Christmas, though. Last year we just had a small program of Scripture reading and singing. I found another old instant message conversation from last Christmas, this one with my friend Mike, in which we allude to this program. Among … other things.

MIKE
do you hear the bells?
for whom do they toll?

ME
the silver bells, or the big scary church bell?

MIKE
um…

ME
Ask not for whom the bell tolls

MIKE
the little ceramic ones shaped like snowmen and things
except little bells don’t toll
they tinkle
or ringle
or go ching ching ching

ME
Ask not for whom the bell ching ching chings

MIKE
hmmm
it chingeth for thee
somehow that doesn’t make chills go down my spine…

ME
it’s the kid-friendly version.

MIKE
who wrote that anyway?

ME
Um, I was about to ask you that.

MIKE
rats

ME
I am a failure as an English major.

MIKE
oh well
uh..
I mean
that’s too bad. I fully commiserate
here’s a virtual hankie

ME
thhhhhhhhhhhhhhhttttt!
That was me virtually using said virtual … oh, never mind

MIKE
my friend made fun of me the other day and I asked him if it was possible to send whooping cough as an e-mail attachment
he said to try

ME
Did it work?

MIKE
I didn’t try
I’m too nice
WE’RE GOING TO COUNTRY CUPBOARD TO GET THE BREAKFAST BUFFET TOMORROW MORNING
oh what happiness

ME
Fancy!!!

MIKE
I can eat breakfast sausage until it comes out my ears

ME
I’M GOING TO MY MOM’S HOUSE TO GOOF OFF ALL DAY TOMORROW.

MIKE
cool
I was going to ask if you were there already yet

ME
I went home earlier this weekend, but came back here so I could go to Midway today for the Christmas program.

MIKE
how’d the program go?

ME
I was reader number three. nothing fancy, but it was little and good.

MIKE
I’ve always wanted to be the Third Reader
kind of like Shakespeare’s Second Murderer
Only not

ME
Hee hee. Becky and I thought of a prank to outrank last year’s refrigerator decorating

[[To explain--The year before Becky and I had decorated the refrigerator on Christmas Eve. We tied dozens of little ribbon bows around the pickles, ketchup, steak sauce, everything. On Christmas morning, my mom sure was ... wondering about the mental health of her daughters.]]

MIKE
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh
I have just written the longest “ooh” in the history of English literature
what is it?

ME
I doubt that’s the longest one, but I digress. we are going to string yarn across the kitchen. It will be so obnoxious and we will be in such trouble! oh boy!

MIKE
can I help?
I could maybe create some sort of diversion

ME
can you send us some virtual yarn?

MIKE
I can try
I’m going to get going
I need to go to bed early if I’m going to get up and eat all that food in the morning
it takes a lot of energy

ME
Wow. That’s intense.

MIKE
yes it is rather
I’ll send an attachment with some yarn

ME
say hi to Judith for me

MIKE
I will and I will tell her that you’re super offended cuz she hasn’t called

ME
Great idea! adios and merry Christmas!

The yarn stringing did work. Now we just have to come up with another Christmas Eve prank … one that is funny, random, and will make my mom laugh, instead of one that will irritate and anger my mother and make her want to return all of our gifts on the spot. Christmas morning is a sensitive time to do things like this.

Oh, and right after our conversation I had to go look up the poet. Because I’m dorky like that. And if I can’t match random lines of poetry with their poets at a moment’s notice, at least I have some pretty amazing Google-fu (that’s like kung fu for nerds).

It was John Donne.

Posted in Hijinks, Strange E-mails, That's life | | | 5 Comments

25 bottles of bubble bath

December 7th, 2008 by witherow

This Saturday was the annual Greenville Christmas parade. As is tradition, Bob Jones University builds and mans a float for said parade. And as is tradition, it is my department (specifically, my boss) who must spend weeks ordering giant light bulbs and setting up the amplifiers and building snowmen out of liquid foam and pretty much building the set from scratch.

So these past couple of weeks we’ve all been helping out how we can. This year’s float featured artificial snow machines, and so I was sent to Wal-mart to pick up the “snow” ingredients as well as a few other items.

We needed four gallons of each of three ingredients. The distilled water was easy. You just go to the bottled water aisle (OK, why do we even have a whole bottled water aisle? Are there really so many ways to put water into overpriced bottles that we need dozens of varieties??) and pick up four jugs of distilled water, each containing one gallon.

Next on the list: isopropyl alcohol. That wasn’t so easy, because Wal-mart didn’t have gallon jugs of that. The largest bottles they had were quarts. And they were all on the bottom shelf. Of course. So, glancing over my shoulder at other customers and trying to look casual, I got down on the floor and proceeded to load 16 bottles of isopropyl into my cart.

Last ingredient: bubble bath. Specifically, Mr. Bubble bubble bath, because Mr. Bubble bubbles are the best for snow. Or so I was told. (Incidentally, when my boss was giving me the list of things to buy, he just said to get Mr. Bubble. Which somehow I was confusing with Scrubbing Bubbles. Which is like toilet cleaner. Which made me wonder why we would be shooting it at the children riding the float. But thankfully he set me straight and thus averted several awkward lawsuits.)

So I find myself in the bubble bath aisle. Mind you, I never have had a bubble bath in my life, so I have no idea where to look for the venerable Mr. Bubble. Having come to the end of the aisle, I happened to turn around and—lo and behold, yea verily—Mr. Bubble. In teeny tiny bottles.

All in all, to make four gallons, I had to fill my cart with 25 fluorescent green and bright blue and hot pink bottles of bubble bath. (If anyone from the Greenville Wal-mart is reading this, um, you’d better go restock the Mr. Bubble shelf. Because I took it all. Every last one. It was almost Grinch-ish of me.)

So now I am wheeling around a cart filled with an army of Mr. Bubbles with reinforcements of isopropyl, and I realize how poorly I have planned because I still have several things on my list. And wouldn’t you know, all of the items are spread randomly throughout the store.

I lug the Mr. Bubble to the garden center to find charcoal for the snowman faces. I lug it to the hardware section to find staple gun staples. I lug (and in case you were wondering, it was heavy and made the cart really hard to navigate) it to the Christmas section, the craft section, and finally the produce section to get carrots for the snowman noses.

And as I was lugging, I tried to come up with things to say if anyone asked me about what seemed to be unconventional purchasing habits.

Things I could have said (with recent input from a few of my friends):

1. It’s for my swimming pool. It’s going to be WICKED AWESOME!!

2. Well, my family’s coming to visit, and I read bubbles are good de-stressers …

3. Bubble bath stock … that’s where the real money is.

4. Bubbles bubbles bubbles bubbles! My bubbles! (this one would work best if paired with a slight facial twitch)

5. Bubble bath? Aw man, I thought this was vanilla extract …

6. The Reedy River will never be the same. Ah-hahahahaha!

7. Bubble bath? Um, what bubble bath?

Disappointingly, no one asked, though I did get an odd look or two. And no burning cars crashed into my trunk on the way back to campus (which I had wondered about, seeing as my trunk was filled with rubbing alcohol and charcoal. I would imagine a fiery crash could result in a gigantic flare-up, possibly an explosion, and the distinct possibility of little flaming bubbles in the night sky. Hey, don’t you ever wonder about stuff like that?)

Thankfully, there were no exploding cars and the Mr. Bubble made it to the parade safely.

If you accidentally got on this page because you Googled “bubble bath,” “Scrubbing Bubbles” or “exploding cars,” thanks for reading. You may go back to your surfing now, hopefully somewhat entertained. Check back again some other time. Tell your friends.

And I hope you find some really wicked awesome pics of exploding cars.

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