Is There Room?


I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and are now crawling out from all the good food and memories.  
One of our best ‘memories’ this season, apart from the wonderful family, adorable kids, much anticipated gifts and all, was a deluge of much needed RAIN!  We came out of our church’s Christmas Eve service to buckets of sweet warm RAIN! It’s been 6 months without a drop in many drought and bushfire stricken areas so you can imagine we all had shouts of joy and some crazy wet dancing, all for the Glory of God and for answered prayers. It continued on and off all Christmas day and beyond.  Our yard is coming back to its original color and the temperatures have dropped from record breaking heat as well.  We are truly blessed! 
Yesterday, I was trimming hedges (a summer job I know, and a nasty one at that, since I’m the ‘main hedge trimmer’ for awhile till Tony pulls himself together).  I decided to take them all down a notch or two, since as long as I’m going to have to stretch, I might as well get the tops down where I can reach them. All you hedge trimming pros out there know, and I’m learning, that the farther down you go the bigger the branches get. What started as an easy task for my little electric trimmer soon turned into a major forestry project, with bigger and bigger tools coming out of the garage. I finally ended up with a cross cut saw (meant for two men, I might add, but this one woman managed it. They don’t call me Scrappy for nothing!). Task completed, I stood back to admire my work, and have to say, even I was impressed. Tony said it reminded him of his days in Estes Park, Colorado, when the elk would come down out of the high country and rampage through every yard in town. That’s one of life’s mysteries: how do they know when hunting season begins, and how do they make it into town just hours ahead of starting time?
Well, anyway, I may have gone a little overboard with the hedges, but I was listening to Christmas music, in a world of my own and unaware of my own abilities. I heard a Christmas song that I don’t believe I’d heard before, but maybe you know it. It’s called 
“Do You Have Room?” by Casting Crowns. I set down the Paul Bunyan crosscut and just stood there absorbing the lyrics while I thought about the question.
Do I have room for the Savior or has he been shuffled off to the hypothetical stable?  Yes, it’s true, there’s been a LOT on our minds these past several months.  Cancer has a way of coming in without an invite and re-arranging all your perspectives. Add to that the lifestyle changes, the occasional fear and anxiety, mixed together with perhaps just a twist of denial, and you might find that you don’t have a lot of room left for guests.  
Or do we?  We were able to have a truly blessed Christmas, and for a few days we didn’t think about unwanted intruders in our hearts. Tony feels fine and continues to be (we believe) healthy.  
But with all the resident joy, there still lurks the fact that many of our own people are in pain and struggle all around us.  To add to that, Tony’s only and favorite aunt went to be with the Lord the week before Christmas.  That was sad for us, because we’ll all miss her. She really had a gift for the wonder of it all and always made our lives a little bit better.  
But our sadness is exacerbated by the fact that her husband, Tony’s uncle, while being teamed up and happily married 63 years, remains a staunch unbeliever.  Over the years he’s been seeing ALL of his family come to Christ, but still he sits on his own recognizance (that must hurt) and insists that, even if there is a God, He wouldn’t condemn a man such as he is. And that much is true: he’s one of the best men I’ve known, a real patriarch for the family. But when it comes down to Jesus, there’s simply no room in his inn. 
Please pray with us for this wonderful man, will you? His whole family is grieving doubly this year, saying goodbye to our aunt and wondering what will become of our uncle. We know that the prayers of righteous people can accomplish a lot (James 5:16). Please join us in making this truly the best Christmas ever!

Love you,
Marsha



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Farewell to a Friend

Good morning,   Many of you know that we have a place in our house where we hang pictures of selected men and women. We call it our ‘Wall of Witnesses”, and it’s based on Paul’s mention of his Cloud of Witnesses in Hebrews 12:1, those who have gone before us and encourage us to run the race with perseverance.  We started our wall many years ago and now have 9 couples who we believe to have helped make us who we are. Of course you’ll see our parents there, a loving and Godly grandmother, but the other people we’ve picked up along the way, all greatly impacting our lives. Unfortunately for us, only a few of these people remain with us today, and it certainly hurt (selfishly) to hear this morning that yet another one has gone to be with the Lord.  But the good news is that he was ready. In his 90’s, now free of pain and rejoicing with his wife…… only having been separated from her for two years. His name was Howard Kroese, but he preferred to be called by his grandki...
Read more

Surprises in the Snow

 Last week I talked about three great men who impacted our lives for the good: Steve Metcalf, Eric Liddell and David Hayman. This morning, just for a break, I’d like to tell you, as that late great news commentator Paul Harvey used to say, ‘The Rest of the Story’ about Steve. Tony and I had heard this story a number of times back when we knew and often worked together with the Metcalfs, but we still shake our heads in wonder. After being released from the POW camp in China and being reunited briefly with his family, Steve went to Japan in 1952 to be a missionary.  This was to the people he had hated so much from his wartime internment camp, but thanks to his friend and fellow prisoner Eric Liddell, had learned how to forgive.  He was single, and so attacked Japanese language school with a fervor given to those who were not encumbered with family.  I look back on my own language school experience, and it still makes me tired!  We had a family, and we found that l...
Read more

A Different Kind of Tour

  Recently in Wales, we took TWO £200 tours. Luckily we've budgeted for this, so even though that's expensive (about $300 each), we were OK Both were very enlightening.  The first one took us around to several castles and into the national park of the mountains of Snowdonia.  One of the castles, called Carnarvon, is where Prince Charles became the "Prince of Wales" a few years ago (now he's the King).  I'm pretty sure C.S. Lewis must have seen this castle and used it as inspiration for “Cair Paravel”, the legendary gathering place for Aslan (read “Jesus”) in his “Lion, Witch and Wardrobe” series. We also found out that the town of Llandudno (in the Welsh language and pronounced something like “Clendendno or something) was one of the selected cities where thousands of English children were sent to be safe in WWII.  Again, right out of the C.S. Lewis series, although in his book, Lewis didn’t mention that it was only children of royal and very wealthy families w...
Read more