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S. A. J. Lyttek, a multiple award-winning writer, always loved writing, but didn’t arrive at the profession in the typical manner. After college and graduate school, she plunged into government consulting. In this environment, she discovered a knack for writing tests, interviews and other measurements. That soon became the focus of her career—reigniting her love for the written word. Thus captivated, she spent evenings freelancing “fun” writing including short stories, poems, articles and cards. When her eldest was a toddler, she quit full-time work to stay home and write. Eager to spend more time with her children, homeschooling intrigued her. From preschool through high school, she homeschooled both sons while continuing to freelance. An integral part of the homeschooling community, she has developed and taught writing classes to a generation of homeschoolers. Married to her childhood sweetheart, Gary, Mrs. Lyttek loves to share her commitment to homeschoolers and her fascination with the written word.
My decorations are down. Karl is home. My birthday is over and done with. Christmas is essentially over.
Or is it?
I keep some Christmas decorations, primarily Nativities, up year-round as you can see in the pictures.
One of my favorite TSO songs echoes the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge, “I will endeavor to keep Christmas all the year,” when they beg for a way to make Christmas last throughout the year. And to an extent, I have always done this. Christmas is my favorite holiday because it reminds us of God’s intervention in history. He is not some distant or ambivalent deity watching what we do and shaking his head. No. He comes right into the thick of our messiness and says I am with you.
Sometimes I feel guilty that Easter isn’t my favorite holiday. After all, the resurrection is what guarantees and provides eternal life for the believer. Since Jesus conquered the grave, he became the firstfruits of the new heaven and new earth that we will one day enjoy. Since he paid a price that we could never pay, we have hope. I treasure that and I understand the significance of it. But Christmas? It is the beginning of that story. Without being born as both God and man, Jesus couldn’t have fulfilled prophecy.
As a writer, I love foreshadowing. I strive to work it into all of my stories so that when someone gets to the end they say “I didn’t see that coming, but it makes sense.” This is Christmas in its purest form. Even though Daniel prophesied the time the Messiah would arrive, they didn’t see it coming because it didn’t make sense. Even though Micah prophesied that he would be born in Bethlehem, no one expected him to show up with the animals or be worshipped by shepherds. Why would the Messiah, the conquering king, be born as a poor child in a carpenter’s family? Why on Earth would he grow up in Nazareth of all places? Galilee was not where the who’s who of Judah lived. No. Instead that was the poor and the working class.
Nothing about Christmas made sense to the theologians of his day. It didn’t make sense, just as the suffering servant passages of Isaiah didn’t make sense, because they expected one coming of their savior. They expected him to come in might and power, as is predicted for his second coming.
And, perhaps, it is with that second coming in mind that I keep my eyes on Christmas.
There were a few who recognized and honored the signs. I think of Simeon, Anna and the wise men. They weren’t bothered by the pieces that seemed different than the expectations of the crowd. If it didn’t violate what they knew of the word of God, they allowed for Him to be bigger than their ideas, and for Him to fulfill prophecies as He saw fit.
Many of us strive to understand God. And if what we know of Him doesn’t make sense, we remake him in our image or put him into a box that we can analyze.
My question as I keep my eyes on Christmas is this, how can the created understand everything about the creator? How can the mite understand the elephant?
Yes, we should do our best to understand him, to learn about him and learn his word. Just because we can’t know everything about God should not shut down our intellect.
But still, we need to allow for our ignorance. We need to remember, day by day, that he is the God who made Christmas possible. He is the God who holds all time in his hands and will fulfill prophecy as he sees fit.
To that end, I will keep Christmas in my heart throughout the year.
Ever have a day or a season when you don’t really want to do anything? Or you try to do something only to see something else that needs doing and that cycle repeats until, at the end of the day, while you may have made slight progress on a dozen things, absolutely nothing got done? Or even worse, you dedicate time to finish a project and your brain refuses to cooperate?
What a way to start the new year.
All I want to do right now is curl in my reading nook (imaginary—I don’t have a reading nook) and let my eyes devour story after story while listening to my favorite tunes and drinking holiday tea. (On that note, my favorite book of 2020 now has a sequel! If I haven’t mentioned it to you, I highly recommend Paranormia by Paul Regnier. Think a mix of C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters and Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom. Well anyway, it now has Paranormia Complex which violates the sequel rule by being just as good, if not better than the first. I downloaded it, read it, rated it and returned it in less than 12 hours. Four hours of that time was spent sleeping.)
I did say ‘distracted’ in the title, didn’t I?
The Christmas season went by way too fast. I’m not ready for ‘regular’ life again. I’m still playing Christmas music (TSO mostly), gazing at my Christmas tree (which unfortunately will come down this weekend—Gary lets it stay up until after my birthday, but any longer than that stresses him out and a stressed hubby is not a good thing!), reading Christmas stories, and watching Christmas movies. I mean, really, I only got to watch Hogfather and Polar Express (my two favorite Christmas movies) once each this season. In fact, I didn’t see any of my regular repertoire more than once and have not yet put in the DVDs of A Charlie Brown Christmas or The Star of Christmas (VeggieTales). That will not do!
When I first wake up in the morning, I write my lists. Ambitious things they are, too. But not long after breakfast, I want to chuck them and give up. Any motivation I had upon rising decayed.
Chalk it up to winter, extended time indoors, lack of exercise (need motivation for that), and the ‘unsettledness’ of the world that surrounds us today perhaps. I can’t get my thoughts to settle in one place long enough to figure it out.
I started writing this post at 8:00 AM. It is now 1:37 PM. Have I done other things in the process? Of course. I didn’t just stare at the words I had written for over five hours. I would write a sentence or two and then see something or think of something and focus on that instead. Since my mouse just decided to disconnect from my computer (it’s done that before and I need to wait for my tech—aka Gary—to show me again how to get it to see my computer and vice versa before I can use it again) I’m wishing I had finished this in a more timely manner. TSO is still playing in the background as it was when I started writing this. I have gotten a few things done like starting some fresh bread for dinner tonight. (I made a double recipe so Karl can turn the other half into cinnamon rolls when he gets home.) I cleared out a bunch of emails, paid some bills.
But as far as the list I wrote this morning? Doing my devotions and writing this post are the only things on it that I can check off.
I rather doubt that anything else on it will be marked complete today. Frankly, as soon as I upload this, I’m going to grab my Kindle and finish reading another book.
Maybe, with a bit more stories flooding my brain, I’ll feel rejuvenated next week—enough so that my focus will return.
Until then, I will be flitting from squirrel to squirrel.
As I post this, we have only one full day left of 2020. It has definitely been a different year than most. In some ways, spending more time with immediate family for instance, it has been a much better year. But being separated from friends and extended family has been uncomfortable at best and downright depressing at worst. And today’s extended trip to Costco reminded me how much I’m looking forward to a day where I can browse through a store without wearing a mask.
There’s so much more I could say about the year we finished and the year ahead. A personal prayer is that the cruise that we have scheduled with our offspring and their others actually happens next December!
Father God:
You know everything. You know our pasts, our presents and our future. The days we just finished did not take you by surprise. Neither will the days that lie ahead of us shock you in any way. All of our times are in your hands.
Help us, dear Lord, to trust you moment by moment in this new year. You know the paths we will walk in. You have determined the total of our days and there is no worry, no agitation, no thought that can add even an hour to that total. Knowing that you love us and want the best for us should allow us to relax when we think things are going wrong. What looks like disaster to us, what even looks like disaster by those around us, may very well work out to bless us. Even if it doesn’t bless us in the here and now, we know that it will work to our good in eternity.
Along that line, help us, Holy Father, to focus on eternity. We know from history that those who keep their eyes on you and your purposes do the most good for this world we live on. It is only by keeping our eyes on heaven that we can draw closer together. Have you seen how fractured your people are, Lord? Have you seen how they forgot to love their neighbors as themselves just because life got hard and complicated? Remind us to keep heaven first in our thought and first in our purposes. If we live like that, we will heal as a people, too.
Speaking of people, help us to look at the people around us who don’t know You God, even those who hate You, as your much-loved creations. You shine your sun on those who hate you as much as those who love you. You gave them the same gift of life. You crafted them in the womb with the same degree of detail. You meant absolutely every cell of their beings. If we love them as you love them, they will see you in us and maybe, just maybe, be drawn to your love.
There’s so much more, God. I mean, we’re talking about a whole new year ahead. But that brings us back to the first point. Nothing will take you by surprise. So please, Father, hold our hands each step of the way.
We love you, God.
Amen.
Today is my friend Karen’s birthday. So this is (kind of) a tribute to her. Did you see the ‘kind of’? (I’m hoping that all my memories are correct and apologize if not in advance!) And if the picture looks odd, I promise it will make sense by the end.
I first met her when we were two in church preschool. Her mom and my mom became close friends so even though we were in different school districts, I spent a fair amount of time with her. Of course, at that time, her last name was not Boring. She married a wonderful man to acquire that moniker.
She became, whether she liked it or not, a constant in my life. That puts a lot of pressure on a fellow kid. But our birthdays are only a couple weeks apart. Technically, I’m older. But I always felt like Karen was older. She stayed even keel a whole lot more than I did. That was especially the case once we got to high school. There, we did indeed go to the same school. (Though our high school was bigger than many colleges!) While I socialized with her at church youth group, I didn’t really see her that much at school. She was much more grounded than I was and always seemed to have a plan or some place to be. At the time, I would have called her ‘boring’ even though on this side of high school, so many years later, I wish I’d been a little more boring and made more logical and honorable choices.
At school, I pretty much only saw her if we were in the same class (which only happened once or twice) and when I was acting the music groupie. It seemed there was often a guy in the orchestra or band that I had a crush on. And since she was in the orchestra and the elite choir, I would run into her in the musical neck of the school. In those years, I was trying desperately to fit in anywhere (other than the smart kids’ group) and therefore fit in nowhere. I’m sure she had her own struggles, since that sort of comes with being in high school, but I didn’t see it. She seemed mature (a good thing in my eyes at the time) and straightlaced/dependable (a bad thing in my eyes then).
I both admired and scoffed at her desire to go to the mission field. Admired the guts it took to decide that, but scoffed at the whole Christianity thing. Christianity was what I played at when I wanted to look good. I taught Vacation Bible School one week and partied with my cousins the next. I wrote moving religious poems at a church retreat over the weekend and then skipped class to smoke or hang out with my friends the following Monday.
But to Karen, God and faith were real. I remember her witnessing to me at one youth group, though I don’t remember what either of us said. I wasn’t ready.
But her words and her life bored down into the core of me. Eventually, her words and those of others saw fruit.
Because that is the other definition for ‘boring’. It means tunneling in. It means digging deep with a purpose. When I worked for transit, I saw the huge machines they used, the borers, drive through impossibly hard soil and rock.
Thank you, Karen, for boring into me year after year. I’m glad we’re still friends on the other side of it all.
Oh, and Happy Birthday!