Marsha's Blog

 Greetings from Sunny and Hot Australia!   I hope you all had the best Christmas ever. I know we did! Why, you ask?  You see, about 10 years ago our wonderful prospective son-in-love proposed to our daughter from the worship team stage at our church, complete with big screen video and lots of fanfare . Fast forward to Christmas day this year, where we sat before that same stage and watched in joy as daughter, her husband, both brother-in-law and father-in-law all joined together with the worship team to lead us in a medley of beautiful Christmas carols. Some of the Pennycuick family had driven almost a thousand miles to get there. They came from New South Wales, the outback town of Broken Hill where there have been something like TWO Covid cases, so they were able to get into Queensland. Mum and Dad didn’t have as far to come, but since they started just over the border in more civilized New South Wales, there were treated to some bureaucratic and complicated permissions to get certifi

  We had the privilege of visiting Bethlehem a few years ago.  On our previous trips to Israel we’d been visiting missionary friends who lived in Nazareth.  They encouraged us to skip seeing it as the Catholics and ensuing tourists had completely over-built and over-glamorized the spot.   I guess they were right, but I was also glad I got to finally see it.  Yes, there’s a beautiful cathedral standing above the place where Jesus was born, but I have to thank the original Catholics, in the form of Helen. She was the mother of Constantine, the Roman Emperor, and when he became a Christian, he sent her to the Holy Land to ‘suss out’ all the holy sites before people completely forgot.  After all, it was already 300AD!  She travelled from village to village, meeting believers and listening to oral history, putting her mark (that of the Roman Empire) wherever she could.  Because of that, there is reason to believe that the CAVES under the cathedral, (that hadn’t yet been built) were plac

  Today is the third Sunday of Advent.  As I’ve said before, there are many ways to interpret these four Sundays leading up to Christmas, depending on your particular church’s traditions. In the circles we run with, the tendency is to focus on Prophesy, The Wise Men, The Shepherds and finally, Bethlehem.   Today, those Shepherds.  You’ll remember awhile back I told you how I’d handed the box of nativity decorations to my middle grandson (he was about six at the time), and asked him to set it up for me. The rest of us went about decorating and Ezekiel was left to his own devices.   He did an excellent job, carefully unwrapping and placing each figure in it’s “traditional” place…… until it came to the shepherds.   As you would expect, he had Mary and Joseph, placed well back in the stable, out of the cold.  The towering wise men were just arriving, along with their entourage of servants and camels. Other animals were placed here and there, some curious to see the Blessed Event, others lo