Hello! I'm glad to meet you! My name is Elizabeth. I am a wife and a stay-at-home mommy to three beautiful girls; I am a musician and a writer. I would love for you to visit with me at MadeSacred.com where I write and try to thoughtfully engage life and culture as a way of loving God and loving others. After all, God has made everything to be sacred, things in our daily lives and things in the world around us.
Green leaves all fallen, withered and dry;
Brief sunset fading, dim winter sky.
Lengthening shadows,
Dark closing in…
Then, through the stillness, carols begin!
Oh fallen world, to you is the song–
Death holds you fast and night tarries long.
Jesus is born, your curse to destroy!
Sweet to your ears, a carol of Joy!
Pale moon ascending, solemn and slow;
Cold barren hillside, shrouded in snow;
Deep, empty valley veiled by the night;
Hear angel music–hopeful and bright!
Oh fearful world, to youis the song–
Peace with your God, and pardon for wrong!
Tidings for sinners, burdened and bound–
A carol of joy!
A Saviour is found!
Earth wrapped in sorrow, lift up your eyes!
Thrill to the chorus filling the skies! Look up sad hearted–witness God’s love!
Join in the carol swelling above!
Oh friendless world, to you is the song!
All Heaven’s joy to you may belong!
You who are lonely, laden, forlorn—
Oh fallen world!
Oh friendless world!
Advent is waiting and so we become still while we wait for Him to come down and rescue us.
We pause in our fighting and our striving, we rest from our grieving and our mourning, we stop to breathe in our busyness and our too much.
Just for a moment.
It doesn’t take any of it away. Yet.
But we become still like Moses with the Red Sea before and the Egyptian army after and we wait for God to fight for us.
We who have lived with the pain for far too long, we who have just received the phone call and sit at our kitchen table in stunned silence, we who can’t see how we will put one foot in front of the other much less get up from our beds in the morning, we who hide in our closets and weep our wracking sobs while we rock back and forth,
just for one moment we become still.
We remember that God is and that He is fighting for us.
It doesn’t solve or heal any of it. Yet.
But it will.
Oh, how it will.
We become still and we wait for Emmanuel. We wait for Emmanuel, God-with-us, to come down.
We wait in this season and we wait in this life for our Emmanuel to come down and fight and make it all okay again.
So for just a moment, take a breath and remember how He already did this once to show us that He will do it again.
These feel like frightening times. The world at large keeps crashing into my small frame of reference.
It doesn’t feel as though I can do anything against the hatred, fear, and violence that keeps cropping up all around us.
Part of my helpless feeling comes from my own world currently being very small.
My days revolve around nursing babies, napping toddlers, and newly-become elementary students.
What I have to give, what I have to offer to stem this dark tide is small.
Our season in life leaves little room for discretionary income and time.
I wonder if anything I do makes much difference.
In this season of Advent, this season of preparing ourselves for the biggest Gift of all, the gifts that I bring to our God, to our world, seem insignificant, tiny.
Leaving my own book to read one more story aloud? Trifling.
Baking cookies to give to our neighbors? Inconsequential.
Giving up a meal out to purchase toys for a toy drive? Insufficient.
Yet as I read still another version of the Christmas Story to my girls I am reminded that an act does not have to be big to be sacred.
Small acts of kindness to those I know, small smiles and gentle words in passing to those who seem different from us, small gifts to strangers are all as sacred and beautiful as the act of preaching to thousands.
You don’t have to have endless resources to be able to change the world. You don’t have to accomplish something enormous to let a glimpse of light in to the darkness.
After all, what is Advent but the remembrance that it was the smallest, most fragile gift of all that was sacred enough to change our world forever.
We wait as in the space before the upraised baton falls in the darkened symphony hall.
We wait as in the space before stepping over the threshold of home.
We wait as in the space before the first glimmer of dawn sparks into the darkest part of the night.
We wait with inhaled breath for the breath of God to arrive.
For the breath of God to arrive and breathe in the air of this world and breathe out the grace of heaven.
As we bundle ourselves against the cold and breathe out frost into the air, so we can’t help but breathe in a breath of hope even as we bundle our hearts against disappointment.
But God is a God of hope, so we can breathe easy and unbundle our hearts to the warmth of His love.
He did, after all, come once before and draw our air into His lungs and in so doing, foreshadowed the way He will come once again and exhale perfection into the very breath of the fabric of our world.
And so, as we wait with inhaled breath, we breathe out love and grace to those we see around us so that they, too, can breathe in a breath of hope
and wait for the breath of God to arrive in our world once more.
Why do we think that we should ease through life surrounded by comforts?
Why do we think that we should be exempt from pain?
God promised, after all, that life will be hard, that life will be full of trouble.
And He promised that it would all be okay in the end.
He didn’t promise that we would see the end while still in this world, but He promised that it would be okay.
Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end. ~ John Lennon
So many died while still hoping for Messiah, still believing that He would come.
And He did.
So many of us will die while still hoping for God to come and make everything beautiful again.
And He will.
But not only that.
If that weren’t promise enough for you.
Not only has He promised that everything will be okay, but He promised that while it is still not okay, He will never leave us.
So hold on. Be still and hold on to those promises with everything in you and you will find that joy and peace that goes beyond anything that is happening around or inside you.
Hold on.
You who are watching her die before your very eyes.
Hold on.
You who are hurt by the one who should protect.
Hold on.
You who are frightened by all you see around the world.
Hold on.
You who feel like your life doesn’t matter.
Hold on.
Hold on.
He will never leave you. And someday it will be okay.
Once upon a time, there was an American who took a hike in the Smoky Mountains.
He was a couple of days down the trail when he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead.
Now by chance a State governor came along the trail, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side.
So likewise, a conservative talk show host happened upon the American as he walked down the trail, and he too passed by on the other side.
Also a local pastor, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a middle-eastern man, dressed in military fatigues and carrying a sub-machine gun, looking much like the pictures of ISIS soldiers, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds…
Much of what Jesus says is ridiculous. Completely unreasonable and absurd. Crazy, even.
But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and to the evil.
It doesn’t make sense and it is uncomfortable and it is hard. It is so very hard.
The idea of praying for those who want to bomb me is ludicrous. The thought of welcoming people who might be preparing to hurt my children is absurd. It makes my heart freeze and my stomach hurt.
I am frightened and I want to obey Jesus only when I can see the outcome, only when I know that I will be blessed, not blown to smithereens, in return.
There are so many commands of Jesus that I skip right over. I look at them, read them, and decide that they are not for me. Following Jesus is hard, and I am a coward.
Which means, if I am honest with myself, that I am no better than those I am frightened of.
The cool, crisp air striking your skin, the blazing bonfire scent filling you up with every breath, the crunch of leaves underfoot. Most of all, the leaves. The dazzling display of fiery colors that fill your sight in every direction.
Those radiant colors that inspire poetry and art are, I recently discovered (or perhaps rediscovered as I feel sure I probably learned this at one time during my elementary school career), actually the true colors of the leaves. The green that we see for most of the year, the green that fills up our springtime and summer, is just the tree-feeding chlorophyll covering up the brightness. It is not until the tree is no longer making food, not until the leaves are beginning to die, that their true colors blaze out.
I want that.
Oh, how I desperately want that.
As I age, as my body moves closer to death, I want for the colors of this life to begin to fade away and the colors of Jesus in me to blaze out.
From the moment we choose life in Jesus, we are changing.
Little by little, day by day, the green of this world starts to fade.
Little by little, choice by choice, the light of the life to come begins to shine.
The older I become, the more I want people to look at me and see Jesus. I want the colors of me, the colors of my natural self, to fade away. I want the brilliance of Jesus to take over.
At the end of my life, my body will be bent and wrinkled, dry and withered. My prayer is that by then my own self will be so one with Christ that when people look into my eyes, they are taken aback with the dazzling display of Jesus that fills their sight.
What are some of the lessons that Mother Nature is teaching you about our common Creator? She speaks loudly if we will only listen.
For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. ~ Romans 1.20
He showed her the beginning, the imagining of dread,
the fear for her baby, the images in her head.
He showed her the disappointment, how time and again
she would hope and then lose, how hope starts to wane,
and asked, Would you?
He showed her the middle, the losing of hair,
the nausea and mouth sores, the exhaustion she’d bear.
He showed her the baby, the years she would miss
and the husband she’d leave and how he’d come adrift,
and asked, Would you?
He showed her the end, the terrible pain,
the loss of her own self, how her mind would be changed.
He showed her how hard it would be to let go of
her life, showed the grief of all those that she loved,
and asked, Would you?
Then He looked in her eyes and showed her one man.
One man who would see the result of God’s plans,
the plans that would turn her pain into glory,
the plans that would turn her night into morning.
He showed her the one who would see what she went through
and the result of his seeing would make him become all new.
He showed her the one who would see her pain, the one
who would watch and see Jesus the Son.
He showed her brief pain lift him out of the slime
and give his soul over to God for all time,
and asked, Would you?
She looked in His eyes and said, Yes.
The beautiful idea behind this poem came from my Dad.
When darkness closes in, will I believe that the light is still there?
Will I trust God’s Word more than my own heart?
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? ~ Jeremiah 17.9
It’s hard in a world telling us that feelings are what is real. We are taught that whatever we feel, whatever we think, this is truth.
Regardless of what I think or feel, however, there is Truth that is above all else.
And that Truth tells me that I am held closely by God no matter what.
Yet now He has reconciled you to Himself through the death of Christ in His physical body. As a result, He has brought you into His own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before Him without a single fault. ~ Colossians 1.20-22 (Italics mine)
He has already done this, and this will never change. No matter what my feelings tell me.
