Second Tuesday of Advent
Forty years ago today, John Lennon was shot and killed outside his apartment building in Manhattan. It was a shocking event that took the life of a young husband and father of just 40 years old and changed the course of music history. I was 21 at the time, and for many in my generation and older, it was a “day the music died” along the lines of that day in 1959 when Buddy Holly died.
Continue reading “One True Light”Second Monday of Advent
Originally posted Thursday, March 5, 2015 – DURING LENT
It’s interesting the way we’ve boxed Advent and Christmas into wintertime and Lent and Easter into spring. It seems we want our Jesus to be born on a dark cold night and to rise on a bright warm day; to come into this world under the harshest of human conditions, and to return in an explosion of heavenly glory. But the weather doesn’t always cooperate. Here in North Texas, it was relatively mild during Advent; not once did it dip below freezing, and we enjoyed many days in the 60s. And today, on the 16th day of Lent, it is 25 degrees with four inches of snow and ice on the ground. We’re supposed to be walking through the quiet, thoughtful, prayerful days of Lent, but we just finished an invigorating trudge to the city park, ankle deep in snow, where families were sledding under a clear, sunny sky. We came home and LeAnn made a snowman, while I went inside to work on taxes.
It’s all mixed up, and that’s OK, because Christmas and Easter don’t belong to a season. They belong to the heart – in whatever season the heart is in.
Second Sunday of Advent
From Wilshire Advent Devotions 2010
On the desk in our upstairs guest room is a framed poem that I wrote one summer while visiting my grandparents. Titled “Peace,” I typed it on my grandfather’s heavy, black, Underwood typewriter with the title word stamped into big block letters with asterisks.
With lines like “It’s in the beauty of the flowers, but not in war or Communist power,” the perspective is definitely 1960s. The evening news was full of the Vietnam War, racial unrest and political turmoil, and pop culture overflowed with songs and posters about peace. I was obviously mimicking what I saw and heard.
Continue reading “Peace”