At Home…in Alaska

Archive for November, 2006

Celebrations

11/23 Thanksgiving! We stayed home for the first time in years and celebrated just ourselves which is the first time ever I think. It was a slow paced relaxed day. Dh and I prepped the turkey together in the morning and put it in the oven and the rest of the day I cooked the other dishes here and there with one daughter or the other of our older daughters. I stayed in my robe until 2pm! Ha! Then, took a nice warm bath. It wasn’t too long after that that all the food was ready and we ate about 6pm. I made an apple pie for desert and then we all went to bed early. Everyone said it was the best Thanksgiving we’d ever had! {{{mush-mush}}} I love my family!

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And continuing…

But for once, and for a special purpose, He dispensed with that long line which is His instrument: once His life-giving finger touched a woman without passing through the ages of interlocked events. Once the great glove of Nature was taken off His hand. His naked hand touched her. There was, of course, a unique reason for it. That time He was creating not simply a man but the Man who was to be Himself: was creating Man anew: was beginning, at this divine and human point, the New Creation of all things. The whole soiled and weary universe quivered at this direct injection of essential life - direct, uncontaminated, not drained through all the crowded history of Nature. But it would be out of place here to explore the religious significance of the miracle. We are here concerned with it simply as Miracle - that and nothing more. As far as concerns the creation of Christ’s human nature (the Grand Miracle whereby His divine nature enters into it is another matter), the miraculous conception is one more witness that here is Nature’s Lord. He is doing now, small and close, what He does in a different fashion for every woman who conceives. He does it this time without a line of human ancestors, it is not the less He who gives life (Matthew 23:9). The bed is barren where that great third party, Genius, is not present.

C.S. Lewis The Joyful Christian pg 57-58 [emphasis added]

Isn’t that an absolutely beautiful word picture at the beginning! I’ve emphasized the places that send shivers through me every time I read them. The whole thing - the whole “Grand Plan” - is just amazingly *beautiful* to me right now. Being with child and the approaching Advent season…it’s a very special combination. And, although I’ve experienced it before, for some reason the significance is hitting me particularly hard this time.

It’s an incredibly inspiring thing to revel in.

Continuing to quote from the passage I began yesterday…

In a normal act of generation the father has no creative function. A microscopic particle of matter from his body, and a microscopic particle from the woman’s body, meet. And with that there passes the color of his hair, and the hanging lower lip of her grandfather, and the form of humanity in all its complexity of bones, sinews, nerves, liver, and heart, and the form of those prehuman organisms which the embryo will recapitulate in the womb. Behind every spermatozoon lies the whole history of the universe: locked within it lies no inconsiderable part of the world’s future. The weight or drive behind it is the momentum of the whole interlocked event which we call Nature up-to-date. And we know now that the “laws of Nature” cannot supply that momentum. If we believe that God created Nature, that momentum comes from Him. The human father is merely an instrument, a carrier, often an unwilling carrier, always simply the last in a long line of carriers - a line that stretches back far beyond his ancestors into prehuman and preorganic deserts of time, back to the creation of matter itself. That line is in God’s hand. It is the instrument by which He normally creates a man. For He is the reality behind both Genius and Venus; no woman ever conceived a child, no mare a foal, without Him.

~ C.S. Lewis The Joyful Christian, pg 57[emphasis added]

With Advent starting in only a couple of days, I thought it neat that this passage from my reading coincided so perfectly.

I can understand the man who denies miracles altogether: but what is one to make of people who will believe other miracles and “draw the line” at the Virgin Birth? Is it that for all their lip service to the laws of Nature there is only one natural process in which they really believe? Or is it that they think they see in this miracle a slur upon sexual intercourse (though they might just as well see in the feeding of the five thousand an insult to bakers) and that sexual intercourse is the one thing still venerated in this unvenerating age? In reality the Miracle is no less, and no more, surprising than any others.

Perhaps the best way to approach it is from the remark I saw in one of the most archaic of our anti-God papers. The remark was that Christians believed in a God who had “committed adultery with the wife of a Jewish carpenter.” The writer was probably merely “letting off steam” and did not really think that God, in the Christian story, had assumed human form and lain with a mortal woman, as Zeus lay with Alcmena. But if one had to answer this person, one would have to say that if you called the miraculous conception divine adultery, you would be driven to find a similar adultery in the conception of every child - nay, of every animal too. I am sorry to use the expression which will offend pious ears, but I do not know how else to make my point.

~ C.S. Lewis The Joyful Christian: 127 Readings pg 56-57

More tomorrow.

** Update @ 9:58am: Ooopsie! My mistake…I forgot to change my “dates to remember” and Advent actually starts Dec. 3rd this year! Anyhow, the timing of my readings and Advent are still relevent.

(Image courtesy of Allposters.com)

To our blog readers!

May the Lord bless you today as you enjoy the bounty of His Provision with love, joy and, yes, thankfulness!

I just had to share a recent apron I made for a customer.

It’s become the favorite by far of all the ones I’ve made! I could just picture it with a khaki skirt, a dark red long sleeve shirt, some old fashioned boots… Of course, being pg, and rather large *already* {groan}, I felt like a huge red bubble when I tried it on. But, I loved it so much, I wanted to keep it for my own! I’m on a quest to find a similar fabric now because I bought the last of the bolt with *just enough* to make this one…

Anyway, I was just so pleased I thought you all might like to take a look too.

Half way there!

I think…

Of course, I’m catching up with the last few months first. I’ll leave all new posts as “stickies” for a couple of days but if you miss one just scroll down as it could be a few days before I’m done. Then, I still need to transfer some archives from Blogger over here after all this time - what’s it been? Two years since I switched to WP? Anyhow, I want to finally get that bit of “blog home cleaning” taken care of. While I do, the month in review pattern I’ve fallen into is working really well so I’ll probably continue that. I may pop in occasionally with something else on my mind…but I’m not making any promises.

So, thanks to those friends who still faithfully check in on us - we love ya! Stay tuned…