Christmas: Pure and Simple

In our complex, hype-filled, spin-ridden world, Jesus comes as a naked baby—pure and simple.  It is His first and lasting message to us:  life is good enough, beautiful enough, powerful enough.  Without embellishment the Word—the Message—is enough.

The Good News started with a resting, newborn infant full of joy and life and peace.  And the final message was the same:  “My peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.  Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

Joy and rest have always been the marks of those who truly follow Jesus.  The great issues of life are laid to rest in Him.

This joy and rest does not require perfect surroundings or easy circumstances.  They are not at the mercy of situation or environment.  This life, pure and simple, is portable and present in the harshest of conditions.  It can make its presence known in stable or palace, hamlet or metropolis. It does not need a scepter, badge, or medallion.  It’s purity and simplicity is its own defense.

But we must never mistake the pure and simple for the weak or ineffectual.  True courage, power and strength are only weakened by distractions and embellishments.  True greatness always seeks to sharpen its focus, pare down accumulations and strip away impediments.

From the womb to the tomb, the power of Life—pure and simple—has had one piercing focus:  to bring that Life to every person who will receive it.  Life unencumbered by all that would weigh it down or slow it down has come to set us free.  Pure and simple!

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Tasting Our Heritage

America is truly the great melting pot.  The foods of all our various heritages have marched right onto the Christmas table, bringing us back to our roots, while, at the same time, making each family’s celebration unique.

Italian families may add pastas and fabulous sauces to the Christmas menu, while Swedish families insist on including gubbröra (an egg and anchovy mixture), vörtbröd (a rye bread) and lutfisk to the traditional ham and potatoes.  For Irish descendants, potatoes are not optional, and soda bread will be a staple as well.  A breakfast favorite of the American south that has made its way to us via France is “chocolate gravy” over homemade biscuits.

Whatever our family histories might be, food is a vital part of Christmas, and kitchens are the place to gather as fruitcakes, Christmas cookies, cream pies with meringue, mince, tarts, turkeys, hams, roasts, winter vegetables and special breads are pulled from the ovens or simmer on the stove.

Some of the best gifts of the season are those from the kitchen:  baked goods wrapped in colorful boxes; jars of homemade jellies, jams and chutneys; delicious breads and pies—all are sure to get grateful responses from neighbors, mail carriers, teachers and business associates.  

Some of my favorite tastes of Christmas are those sipped steaming hot from a mug or glass cup:  hot chocolate, wassail, rich coffees, chai, Christmas teas, warmed fruit juices and punches. At our house we have a golden yellow earthenware pitcher and a set of gigantic matching cups and saucers lettered on the sides with the French word chocolat.  This special set is saved for one purpose:  hot chocolate with a melting marshmallow for children who come in half-frozen from sledding on the hillside.

It is the tradition in our family to have homemade biscuits (my mother’s recipe) and dried beef gravy (my version) for breakfast on Christmas morning. I serve it with a chilled bowl of fresh mixed fruit and a thin glass of sparkling grape juice.  We have this hardy breakfast after we have read the Luke 2 story of the birth of Jesus and taken turns opening our gifts to each other.  

Later in the day, I perk a giant pot of wassail so we can sip it all through the afternoon and evening and offer a steaming cupful with a slice of lemon and a stick of cinnamon to those who come in to join the music, games, and Christmas dinner.

As I think of it, Christmas is a giant, season-long tasting party.  The tastes and aromas are avenues to the loves we have known that have become a part of who we are. The tastes and smells of Christmas are much more than traditional family foods; they put us in touch with the Love of a God who came to eat with us, sit at our table, hear our stories and tell us His.

The traditional tastes our families share remind us that God never was and will never be apart from us, but, instead, is as close as breath, as near as, well, the wonderful welcome-home smells coming from the kitchen.  He is the gift we give and receive.  He is the light that shines through the window of our souls.  He is the fire in the fireplace, the warmth to draw us in, the food that feeds much more than our bodies.

It is the Mass of Christmas.  Christmas! Taste and see!

(Some of our favorite Christmas recipes along with lyrics and stories behind many of our Christmas songs are in He Started the Whole World Singing and Homecoming Cookbook. Both books may be ordered from Gaither Family Resources or the Gaither.com store.)

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Sensing Christmas

I like to think of the mind as the center city into which flows five major highways:  sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. It is by way of these thoroughfares that we experience life in all its complexity.  It is by the senses that we learn, gain insights, and internalize all that is true and helpful for life.

If ever there were a truth that needed to be internalized in every way, it is the amazing story of a God who spoke all things into existence and continues to sustain creation with His breath, yet who loved His creation so much that He himself came as a helpless baby to touch us at our point of need.  When we weren’t understanding the immensity of His love for His creation, He spoke His love in terms we could comprehend:  the sound of a baby’s cry on a cold night, the smell of a lowly animal-filled stable, the rough texture of a feeding trough filled with coarse straw, the brightness of a new star in the dark night sky, and the taste of the Bread of Life to feed the souls of us all.

Since that night more than two millennia ago that divided time itself into B.C. (before) and A.D. (after), those whose lives have been changed by this baby boy have created dozens of symbols and traditions in their efforts to express an event both human and divine.  All the senses have been called into play by the deep longing to share the very personal experiences of a cosmic and eternal change point.

Light, warmth, belonging, satisfaction of deep unnameable hungers, fresh and eternal life, spiritual pilgrimage, the divine gifts, the return of the Song of Life…all these need the ladder of symbol to even begin to approach and express the depths of redeeming Love.

Each of us has been the recipient of a rich heritage of traditions and symbols given by others so that we can experience and in turn communicate to our children the unfathomable love of God, the God who came to walk with us, to touch us where we are broken, to feed us the true water and bread of the spirit, and to be His love made visible.

As we celebrate Christmas, let’s use all the senses, every avenue we have—to embrace this amazing Story.  As we do, let’s remember to always tell and retell the reason for every tradition, giving thanks for the reality we celebrate!  Let’s promise each other that every highway to the soul will never become a bypass.
 

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Pilgrims and Wisemen: Two Journeys-- Toward and Away From

Passion for something more: it is the strong magnet that pulls the human spirit out of the habitual and mundane into the realm of the unsafe and unknown.  It is the fuel of valor and discovery.  It is for want of passion that the world is dying.  It is the murder of this longing for the heights that strips the roots of hope from the seedlings of promise, leaving children passive or frantic, adolescents “leaden eyed” and adults accepting of the status quo of mediocrity.

But somewhere buried in the soul of us all is the deep knowing that there is more—that freedom and joy and peace and forgiveness and grace and mercy are more than platitudes of the pious.   Somewhere in our ground of being we know that these, yes, these are the rock-solid foundations of real life—not the fantasies of fiction. 

When dissatisfaction with persecution or just pointless routine reaches the lip of our container of tolerance and breaches the limits of our endurance, the longing for raw and pure life breaks the dam, and we are driven out and empowered by the gushing currant to cut a new path.

Thus, we come at some juncture of our circumstances, to become pilgrims, leaving what once imprisoned our souls and held us back, and, at the same time, becoming wise enough to follow the star of better aspirations.  We dare to bite off eternity.  We are driven by a pioneering of the spirit to follow God himself into the frightening unknown, for, as Aslan said, this One who calls us is not safe, but he is kind.

This is the seeker’s season, the season to trade the lesser things for more.  It is the season for turning flat-bed trailers into covered wagons and striking out for a territory yet unclaimed.  It is the season for setting sail in spite of possible rough seas for a place where prayers are released, not legislated, and where children can dance in the promise land of creative work and opportunity.

This is the season for studying the heavens and hanging our hopes on a star—not just any star but the star that announces One who came to tear down partitions between the dream and the reality, between here and there, between now and forever, between mortality and eternity. 

Will we dare?  Will we take the risk of losing the transient to win the lasting?  Will we risk dying to be reborn? Will we cut anchors for the open sea, or set off across the desert in pursuit of the new star?  Will someone ever read about us in the journals of Pilgrims and Wise Men?

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Finishing Something

There is something about harvest time in Indiana that makes me feel that I should finish something.  Perhaps it is the threshing machines cleaning up the rows of wheat and spitting the swollen ripe kernels of grain into the waiting grain trucks to be taken off to storage bins in preparation for winter.  Maybe it is the wide plows that turn the traces of corn stalks and dry soybean plants under, leaving the fresh, black earth like a velvet carpet laid in neat squares against the kelly green sections of newly sprouted fields of winter wheat. Or could it be the squirrels skittering around the yard stuffing acorns and walnuts into their cheeks, then racing off to bury their treasure before the snow falls. Or maybe it’s the last of the apple crop being pressed into fragrant cider or baked with cinnamon and brown sugar before the frost comes.

Whatever the reason, this is the season to finish things, to tie up loose ends, to save and store, to harvest and be sure there is enough of everything that matters to last us through the hard times.

And how does one finish a season of the heart? How may we harvest and store the bounty of the spirit and save against the elements of fruits we cannot see?

The Pilgrims knew the answer.  They said “Thanks.”. They knew there must be a taking of account, a time to stop and be aware of the beauty that fills our lives—a time to realize and verbalize and celebrate the things that have been growing all along. Yes, gratitude is the instrument of harvest. It ties the golden sheaves in bundles. It plucks the swollen kernels from the chaff and cuts the fragrant grasses to be bound in great round bales.  It picks the crimson fruit and digs the rounded roots that sometimes have made the difference between life and death.

And I am thankful!  Thankful for plenty—plenty and more—of things to eat and wear, of beauty like art and colors and textures, of means of transportation like cars, bikes, vans, busses, planes…and feet.  I am thankful for things we cannot buy like tenderness and inspiration and revelation and insight; I am thankful for ideas, words, songs, discussions, and silent messages of the heart.

I am thankful for health, health that we take so for granted that we schedule our lives, assuming that things will be normal, that legs will walk. That eyes will see—to read, to experience, to learn. That ears will hear-- the music, the instruments, the warnings the blessings, the sounds of nature.  That bodies will function—that food will digest, energy will be generated to perform daily tasks. That minds will comprehend—the beauty, the concepts and ideas, the dangers, the failures.  That hands will work—to reach, to hug, to write, to drive, to rake leaves, to sweep floors, to fold clothes, to play instruments like pianos, flutes, violins, drums and oboes.

I am thankful for family, family with individual personalities, gifts, needs, and dreams—for family immediate and family extended, all feeding into what I am and what I will become, even family departed who have lived out their part and left their heritage of hard work, integrity, grit, love, tenderness, faith, and humor.

I am thankful for friends, for stimulating, vivacious, provoking, disturbing, encouraging, agitating, blessing, loving, forgiving friends.

I am thankful for hope and love and a deep assurance that God is in control of our lives, an assurance that is not threatened by fear of nuclear annihilation or national economic failure.

I am thankful for children who give us new eyes to see, new ears to hear, new hands to touch new minds to understand all the old things.

I am thankful for courage to go on trusting people, risking love, daring to believe in what could be, all because of the confirming experience of daily trusting God and finding Him utterly trustworthy.

And because the seasons are built into the very fiber of our being, I am thankful for harvest time, a time for finishing what’s been started, a time to be aware, to pay attention, and to realize the life we’ve been given. Because I know that if we harvest well, there will be seeds for planting in the spring.                              

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All of It!

Our children are grown now.  They have families of their own.  They all have creative vocations and are making a difference in ways that make Bill and me proud.  If you would see these adults, you would see them as they are now, and that would be good.

But when I see them, I see more than just this present image of lovely young adults.  I see the babies I held, the children who tumbled down our hillside into the piles of fall leaves or drifts of winter snow.  I see their first piano recitals and hear the junior high rock band practicing in the basement.  I see the poetry contests, the opening nights of community theater productions, the first recording projects.  I see fireworks on the 4th of July, kids fishing in the creek or horseback riding at the 4-H fair.

I see an involved father creating a film project, a seasoned writer researching a musical she’s writing on the early circuit riders, an accomplished actress and authority on Shakespeare hosting a closing night party for the cast.  I see a graduate, a bride, a new mother, a songwriter, a kid shooting hoops in the drive-way, a teen-ager on a first date….  I see all this when one of our grown children walks down the mill-stone walk under the grape arbor and through our kitchen door.

If you ask me to describe what heaven will be, I think it will be “all of it.”  All the seasons, spring blossoms, summer fruit, fall harvest, winter rest—all going on simultaneously.  It will be the big picture, the full content, the total vision.

It will be the ultimate expression of our gifts and abilities using everything we’ve ever learned and experienced with total freedom to create, think, enjoy, comprehend, assimilate, and celebrate.  Our loved ones will be beautiful beyond anything here, so beautiful it will take our breath away.  Yet they will be uniquely themselves in ways which this life could only limit.  

All the perfect will be there—of foods, sounds, sights, tastes, insights, experiences—and none of the ugly, negative, frustrating, or limiting.  Yet all will be infused with the possibility of something more with no sadness, no pain, no disappointment in ourselves or disillusionment with others.  No lying, no deception, no violation.  Everything and everyone will have dimension.  Heaven will be “all of it.”
 

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Gather 'Round!

The feel of fall is in the air – a time of finishing the growth cycle, a time for “gathering in.”  Harvest is, too, the time for gathering in family and friends, a time when our hearts seem to make their way back home.

Fall Festivals are celebrating our communities, and families are making plans for summer’s last picnics, last trips to “the cabin” at the lake or in the woods, or the journey home for Thanksgiving.

Music is so much a part of all that brings us joy in the fall.  It’s time for gathering around a piano somewhere to sing in harmony the songs that renew the commitments made to God, to each other, and to our great country, or to sit around the fires of fall with a guitar or autoharp and teach parts to the children to the favorite songs we grown-ups first sang as a kid.

 I believe there is an important reason we must sing in harmony--even a theological one--whether in families or in the Family of God: we are not one because of our consensus, but because of our commitment.  Indeed, we are so different and have so many viewpoints it’s hard to get a consensus at the dinner table let alone in the church or in the broader community of believers.  No, we are not one because of our consensus, but because of our commitment to something bigger than our individual opinions.  It is our commitment to God and thus to each other as necessary parts of His Body that makes us one.  We each bring our unique identities in Him and join our voices in expressing our allegiance to Him.  Amazingly what results is beautiful harmony, but one song.  Oh, sometimes, for a line or two we may sing unison to emphasize some major statement, but mostly it is our very diversity that God uses to make His music.

So this season of gathering in, let’s gather the children, the young people, the patriarchs and the matriarchs, the newcomers and veterans and sing our hearts out the messages that define our identities in Him – in harmony.

And there’s nothing better for singing our roots than the hymns that have outlived us all, surviving trends and fads, good times and hard times.  Great hymns have been tried in the fires of human experience and have emerged true.  Let’s pass these pure gold gifts on to our children so that when life drops them into water over their heads, these bits of portable theology, these Truths wrapped in music will be a life-line when they’re needing one in the worst way.

And let’s let the young ones sing to us the new songs that are speaking to them in the reality of the world as they are experiencing it. Let’s learn the new harmonies and add our voices to the chords.

It’s fall!  As we gather in all that is dear, let’s choose a part and sing both our history with God and our love for each other – in harmony!

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Everything Counts

I sipped iced tea waiting for my fried chicken salad and looked around at the families with toddlers in wooden booster seats and teenagers playing the peg game on the tables. Two scruffy ten-year-olds were playing checkers by the fireplace while they waited for their food to come. A grey-haired couple over by the barn wood wall was pointing at the vintage portrait of a serious-looking woman in a high, lace trimmed collar, as their waitress sat down a white stoneware plate of biscuits and corn muffins.

I picked up the package of soda crackers my server had brought to go with my salad and noticed that they were thicker than most crackers. I wondered to myself what company had made them for Cracker Barrel to custom label. Curious, I turned the packet over to check and noticed a small box of very small print, so small I reached for my glasses to read the tiny message.  It said:

People often ask us where we got our name. It’s simple—back in the old days, crackers were shipped in barrels to country stores. When the barrels were empty, they were used as a place to hold a checkerboard, a conversation, or both. We’d like to think some things never change.

At Cracker Barrel everything counts: every rocking chair on the porch, every package of penny candy or Clove gum, every country churn on the shelf, every rusty Barq’s Root Beer sign on the wall—everything counts to make us weary wayfarers feel like we just dropped by the ol’ home place for pot roast and mashed potatoes.

In life everything counts, too. Every part-time job we ever held, every softball season we played through the dog days of summer, every great book we ever read, every experience at youth camp, every girl or guy that broke our hearts and we survived, every term paper we ever researched and wrote, every car we worked to pay for, every sweet and thoughtful thing we ever did to help grandma—everything counts.

I have a feeling that people who “make it big” with their worth and integrity in tact, got where they got one small thing at a time, because age and money only make us more—more whatever we are. If we are kind, generous, thoughtful, honest young people, chances are we will be kinder, more generous, more thoughtful old people. If we are responsible, caring, dependable teenagers, we probably will be responsible, compassionate, dependable leaders when we’re older and have more resources.

But if we take the easiest way out, cut corners, and cheat on exams when we’re young, we will most likely spend our later years “covering our tails”, betraying our friends and spouses, and making up bigger lies to cover the last ones.

The great news is that if our kids are discouraged because life isn’t happening fast enough, or if you are 45 and still don’t feel as if you are where you had hoped you’d be by now, everything counts. Everything matters. Every choice, every failure, every experience—all of it informs and equips the way we’ll spend the moments we have today.

Today I am switching the house around from the look of the busy summer to the warmth and colors of fall. Everything counts:  the smells, the colors, the tastes, the textures, the music…. All of it is intentional and all of it matters if I want those who come through our kitchen door to “love it here in the fall!” I am peeling apples for a cinnamon apple cobbler. I am playing a CD of dulcimer music while I wrap a garland of fall leaves around the bannister of the staircase leading up to the playroom. I am bringing in acorns and pumpkins, cattails, bittersweet, and berries. I will light the rust colored candles and change the yellow tablecloths to the brown and copper ones. I just put on a pot of Bill’s favorite black bean soup and made a pan of cornbread. I say to myself: I have this day! Everything counts.  

Isn’t it about time to set up a new fall puzzle?

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Building Fires

Bill is a fire-builder – all kinds of fires. He loves to build bonfires out of doors. We have a fire pit at our home down by the creek, one at his Grandpa Grover’s farm place (Grover’s Corner) and one at our cabin in the woods. He also builds fires in our kitchen fireplace which he keeps going all through the night from the first chill of October to the thaw of April.

There is nothing like a fire to draw people in and make them feel at home. Fires call up memories of all the warm times of one’s life.

Our fireplace is often the gathering place for great conversations, lingering meals, and children drying out from an afternoon in the snow.

We have three places in our house for cozy fires: our family room, our kitchen, and our bedroom. Fire is an important ingredient in the activities of all these places. Our bedroom – our special place – is made instantly inviting after a busy, stressful day by the cracking of a fire. I often turn on the fireplace log in the morning to make it more enticing for Bill to crawl out to face the day.

Our family room is where the grand kids play and where suppers of soup and grilled cheese sandwiches are eaten by the fire, or where we gather around the piano to sing – by the fire.  

But our favorite fireplace is in the kitchen. This is the great heart of our home, and the fire is a living presence that calls us to be “present.”

I believe it is our calling as Jesus people to build fires wherever we go that draw people in, provide warmth and welcome, and dispel the chill of our broken world.  

One could do worse than spend a life building fires!

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Beans and Corn

I’m a water person (Pisces), born in Michigan and surrounded there by literally thousands of fishing lakes and encapsulated by seas of fresh water we call the Great Lakes.  It would have taken a call of God on my life to make me leave these amazing waters and move to “seas” of corn, soybeans, and wheat.  But that “call of God” showed up when I met Bill Gaither, a Hoosier English teacher who was teaching at the high school near Anderson College.  I was a junior in college when I was sent to that high school to teach the French classes for a teacher who was out for a whole six-weeks period for cancer treatment.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

When Bill and I were married a year later, it took a while for me to deal with the withdrawal from water I felt and even longer to actually fall in love with beans and corn.  As we have since traversed this great country singing, I have discovered that every region has its own particular charm—the desert states, the mountains, the seashores, the towering forests—and the great belly of the country we call “the bread basket of the world” is no exception. 

I have grown to love the subtleties of shades of freshly plowed earth; I love the fields at rest, covered with the forgiving snows of winter.  I love the gradual changes from the tender green of miles of winter wheat when all else is still brown and thawing in the spring.  It takes my breath away when the soybeans are two feet tall and thick as fur on a husky, turning all of central Indiana into an expansive, green lawn as far as the eye can see—or, at least until it collides with another infinity of tasseled corn way higher than “an elephant’s eye.”

Folks here have the saying about the corn: “knee-high by the fourth of July,” but, trust me, the corn behind the barn at Grover’s Corners (Bill’s grandfather’s farm) is twice the height of our 6 ft. tall grandson Will.

By the time the corn is that high, the beans are turning golden, so gold it dazzles the eyes to see it in the late afternoon sun.  And in a week or so, the gold leaves disappear and the stems of ripened soybeans are a brown as rich as the acorns on the oaks.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

Our son Benjamin (who has created several fun projects for kids) used to joke with his sisters about the conversation neighboring farmers must have at the grain elevator when they get together to plan the next season. 

            “What you gonna plant next year?”

            “Oh, I put out beans this year, so I’ll pro’bly plant corn.  How ‘bout you?”

            “Ah, I think I’ll plant beans.  Had corn this year.”

There had to be a song about that!  But, trust me, it’s fun among friends who love this vast prairie and are thankful for it!

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We Have This Moment

In my life I have been given many wonderful gifts: lovely handmade embroidered items, expensive works of art, earthy rustic crafts, primitive water paintings on simple newsprint created by the chubby little hands of children. I have been honored and complimented. I have had the thrill of hearing the songs I’ve helped to create recorded by famous singers and sung by congregations in my own language and in foreign languages. These are all gifts I treasure.

But none of these gifts have been so valuable to me as the gift of a rich childhood and youth in a solid, loving, celebrating home. The heritage of a family who loved God and each other, who greeted every new day with anticipation and openness, shaped my values and taught me that life was good. The healthy balance of discipline and freedom, the love of simple things, the respect for all kinds of persons, a deep reverence for God – all these wrapped up in special moments and given to me in the package I call my childhood.

I truly believe that most of what I’ve been able to do with my life has been a direct result of the rich heritage I enjoyed. I am certain that my family gave me a head start on life with a realistic concept of God and His Son, a love affair with nature, and an excitement for living. My home brought me to the threshold of adulthood with a secure confidence that I was loved and a deep responsibility to myself and the world around me for developing whatever special abilities and gifts God had given me.

My parents always pastored small Michigan churches, so we never traveled widely or were afforded the luxuries some families enjoy. Instead, we learned to celebrate life in simple ways and to create our own special moments and traditions from the raw material of common things. My mother, who was an artist and writer, taught my sister and me to see what many others missed. She gave us a deep appreciation for beauty and books and a great love for words and language. Daddy was the master of spur-of-the-moment parties on a shoestring: a Dairy Queen after church, a roadside picnic breakfast, the presentation of a special dress he’d scrimped to buy for Mother for an important event. It was Daddy who gave me my very own garden spot (even though he had to dig up the thick, green sod to do it) and gave me full rein to plant anything I wanted to. I learned from him the joy of “preferring one another,” as every summer we would take fishing trips to the far north because Mother loved to fish. I remember him digging fishing worms, cleaning bass and catfish until midnight, lugging soggy rowboats into and out of the lakes, and rowing for miles, all just because of seeing Mother get so much fun out of “hooking a big one.”

At our house everything was an event, and it was to our house that Evelyn’s and my friends always came to “hang out”; we knew that if we needed a place for a gathering of any kind, it was okay to volunteer our place. Mother was the confidante for many a teenager, and it was not uncommon for someone in distress to knock on our door at midnight seeking comfort and advice. It never occurred to me to keep anything from her. She was my best friend. Soon our own children were running to her house whenever they needed someone to talk to or simply a place to be. She taught our son to paint with oils and to see things in a world around him that others miss. She critiqued our daughters’ poetry and boyfriends. She was their best friend too.

When I married Bill, I found another big, loving family – an Indiana farm family, who loved the earth and celebrated harvests and holidays, Sundays and birthdays with big dinners and warm family gatherings: tables groaning with home-grown vegetables, fresh corn-fed meat, and steaming fruit desserts; children of all ages and sizes scampering around the patriarchs and assorted distant relations; the joyous noise of adult conversation, shrieking children, and spontaneous music.

Because we so appreciate our own heritages, Bill and I chose to live near both our families. We believed there was great value for our children in knowing their roots, which gave them a sense of perspective and continuity. In a society as mobile as the one we all live in, Bill and I feel very blessed that we were able to offer our children a close relationship with their extended family and close friendships with their young cousins and aging relatives. Living close to our extended family has not always been problem free, but we feel the benefits far outweigh any problems.  Good or bad, family is family and life is life. Children need a realistic view of the influences that have come together to make up the sum total of what they are.

As Bill and I welcomed Suzanne, Amy, and Benjy into the world, we drew from the rich heritage we had been given to work toward becoming the kind of caring, compassionate family we believed God wanted us to be. Now our children have homes of their own, and Bill and I find great delight in watching them and their spouses pass on to our grandchildren the principles our parents gave us. We are all still “kids under construction,” fed and nourished in the soil of our shared pasts from the seeds God has planted in us. Just as our parents contributed so much to our children’s memory banks, we are now helping to make memories for our children’s children!  

The home is the natural habitat for growing human beings and shaping eternal souls. Whether we like it or not, we are molding lives … now. Let’s make these precious moments count.  

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The Porch

“Come sit a spell.” These old words lapsed into disuse for the decades of manufacturing and “jobs in town,” the decades after the farm. But now, thankfully, porches are reappearing on houses and the invitation to share them is back in our vocabulary.

When Bill and I first built our colonial house in the early 60’s, the “porch” was basically a façade barely wide enough to accommodate the pillars and a lawn chair. Our children grew up tumbling down our hillside and fishing in “Gaither’s Pond,” but there wasn’t much porch-sitting going on.

Just before we learned our first grandchild was on the way, however, Bill and I said to each other one day, “Why don’t we build a real porch, upstairs and down?” So we called a builder to explore the possibility of moving the pillars out about 12 or 15 feet, turning two of the upstairs windows into doors, and making porches accessible to both downstairs living and upstairs guest bedrooms.

Now the porch is like a special summer room, with lots of rocking chairs and conversations. People who used to hurry by afraid they were “putting us out” when we invited them inside, quickly accept an invitation to have a lemonade on the porch. At night when the grandchildren are in their pajamas, we make tea and take snacks upstairs on the porch which feels like a treehouse. We listen to the frogs and cicadas and watch garden spiders crocheting lace between the white porch rails.

I take my journal and coffee to the porch very early in the morning to talk to God and hear the world coming to life for a new day. When the kids who have spent the night awaken, we eat scrambled eggs and fruit at the little glass table and talk each other’s legs off while the tulips, geraniums and impatiens watch us from the garden that edges the porch steps and the black squirrels chase each other through the limbs of the maples and oak trees in the yard.

Oh! The joy of porches! No house should be without them. If the world is alienated and people are lonely, maybe porches can be the catalyst for bringing us together again.

Come. Sit a spell!

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Love Song To My Life

Welcome!

At the urging of a close friend, I have decided to write a blog. Now, this is funny, because all my life as a writer I have written short observations of life. I wrote short pieces because for more than 20 years I was traveling every weekend with my husband as part of the Bill Gaither Trio while having and rearing three children very close in age, writing lyrics for the songs Bill and I wrote together, and entertaining a constant stream of friends and guests and, eventually, teen-agers and college students that came through our house.  All this while trying to help run a publishing company, pull weeds in the gardens, teach a college class in Songwriting, keep up the laundry, run kids to a variety of activities and lessons, and keep romance alive in all the ways I could think of—romance with my husband and romance with my life.

I would periodically complain to God asking, “When am I ever going to get to write a real book?" Truth is, I could hardly get alone time in the bathroom, let alone to Hawaii for two months at a time (like male authors I knew did) to write their latest book while their wives waited on them hand and foot.

The other day I had an epiphany! I’ve been writing a blog before there were blogs and before ADHD was a national epidemic. So I guess I’ll just keep writing what I see and what life is teaching me in short snippets. I hope you will tell me what you see and learn too.

Most of all, I hope we all get better at noticing the beauty in the common things and the miracles we trip over all around us every day, 

For we have this moment to hold in our hands
And to touch as it slips through our fingers like sand;
Yesterday’s gone, and tomorrow may never come,
But we have this moment...today.

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