December 26th

December 11, 2012December 11, 2012 ~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 12 Comments

I have got my eye on you
Like a hawk
Steel eyed, glassy,
Fixed gaze
Not blinking
You have come before
And dropped the black cape on a place
On a home
Covered in paper it feels like lead weight
You taunt and tease
And say what now
You know the drain of excess and of spent lives
Spent wallets
Spent souls
And you peel back the layers
Seeing weary and wondering
But not this year
You will have no place
No room in the inn of our home
No hearts left empty from want or greed
No taking down tinsel with a tear of despair
No now what’s and what’s nows
We will call you glorious too
And name you day of continued praise
And walk out with the love came down at Christmas
The day after
And call it a day of beauty too
When hearts filled by Him and with Him and of Him
Can go out into all the world
For He has set the captives free
And so we are
Of worry want and dread
And instead
Paint all the days of gray
With berry red rejoicing

I’ve got my eyes on you
Warm stare of welcoming
You’ve slammed the door on joy
And wagged a boney finger at a home
What now you tired and weary souls
What will you do this day
As you look back on all the days of Advent
And a life which lead you to the dirty
Manager
On the mantel
In the past
We’ve wrapped Him back with care and love
And felt a sadness
It is over
When in fact
Its just begun
The day one of continued celebration
Of that bright and silent Holy
Night
Of birth and making all things right
Here right now
We live the days of joyful man
Because we know the cross
In all its sacrifice
So day you will not live as day of infamy
And gloom and spent and sadness for an end
Of Celebration
No, the blood red rejoicing will continue
The weary world’s rejoicing
For He came and He reigns
Forever
Even and especially on
December 26th
When all the Christmas
Hope
And Christmas
Love
And new and glorious
Lives reconciled to Him
Should find us
Falling on our Knees
And singing
Still
The Hallelujah Chorus
To a tired and weary world

Joining Jen, Eilleen and Emily today.

Also joining Heather for Just Write.

The Power and The Beauty of One

December 10, 2012December 11, 2012 ~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 9 Comments

It runs through me like a current of the electric. Strong with awakening.

Powerful in its thrust and pulse.

And haunting like a metronome in its consistent cutting moves.

We can hear a message and it sounds like its cutting through clutter, the thick fog of a world’s static noise with its clarity.

In a season of waiting and working and wading toward Christmas how singular and powerful One is.

I see it repeated in my life like the multiplication tables of my childhood, again and again repetition brings understanding and memory and a lodging in the deep places. Where facts or is it truth should make its home and remain.

The power in One’s.

So my heart and my head just hear a singular message and it could be tucked away as many lessons are. Or it could be shared, as this one is. But you always seem to be so generous with your one life in how you listen in love here.

I hear and feel the gentle whisper to give it wings. This picture of the power so often held by one.

There is strength and power in one. And it is made clearer in our Advent waiting for the celebration of the holy night into which Our Savior was born.

And God being God could have sent an Army, a battalion of Saviors. He could have sent triplets or twins or multiples to accomplish that which he so lovingly planned for our reconciliation to Him. We sinful, He holy.

But He sent His only Son. He sent One.

And so I look at His world and my world and this world through the lense of just how powerful one can be.

We have one heart, but two ears and two eyes. One heart keeps us beating breathing from birth to death. One.

And I look in the sky at a moon by night and a sun by day. Day in and day out we are sustained by both. Singularly life giving, the sun its light. The moon and the tides and all that I don’t understand about the holy mystery of that.

The power in the heavens. By ones.

We women who are married live with the gift of one husband. And I think mine does the work of three or four men daily. And every day the beauty revealed, the mystery grows more holy and unfathomable.

The things accomplished through love in a family utterly amaze this wife of almost 25 years. And we have only just begun. Those things learned within a family are holy mysteries.

One family can teach us much about living.

The bride of Christ. One bride, one bridgegroom. The work to do on earth is large and ever looming. One and one. Just Amazing Grace.

After pouring out on the pages here words of offering as encouragement or hope or just art, the art found in weaving of words, I have often had one single comment speak into my heart…if only for that and for her it was all made worthy. It became something of value if it reached one heart of one woman or one man. One soul. A single solitary soul.

I write for One but often I am touched and blessed by one reader. And it is tender and merciful. I shake and shutter at the interaction between reader and writer.

And in this season of preparing for Christmas I am frozen in my ability to design and construct the proper expression of my love for family and friends. Numbed and deemed unable to decide how to move with a release of gifts and talents and money into the land of Christmas giving.

For my giving is an excercise in the imperfect mirroring of love, as He gave everything, His one child. So we give.

And I know if I am wise I can impact the life of one with my giving. One child entangled in a cycle of poverty. One family, maybe with my giving.

It is inconceivable that I could really touch one, another with a gift. The unfurling of my meager offering. To love as Christ loved me.

That we all can, each one of us can.

And that one is enough, though it seems small. One is a good start. And one is important. And he can increase and multiply the power of Ones.

If God saw power, life changing power at that ,in one, who am I to minimize the power in one gift, to one child, or one family. To another one in this world.

When I feel small and insignificant and frozen into inaction by the meagerness of my giving, I think on God’s ability to multiply my starting point.

The power of God to do big things with my small offering.

To inspire me to increase or expand. To take a gift and magnify its effectiveness.

If I let loose of my gifts, give them to Him, release and trust them to Him, to use and heal and give hope, then I give Him his rightful authority and power. To do with my oneness bigger things than I could do with any single offering.

To Him be the power and glory that are His, and may we release our singular offerings to His service, His glory and to be used for His Divine choosing. For His purposes.

I am going over to the Compassion Christmas GIft Catalog. To ask Him how what I have may be used over there.

I need nothing. I want for nothing. My family and friends need and want for nothing, truly.

But maybe, just maybe, God can take my small offering and turn it into something much bigger than I ever could.

On my own.

Alone. I haven’t been the best steward of all He has given me. It would be wise to release more back to His hands for His use.

There I know they are in good hands.

There I know they will be used for His glory and His purposes.

He is the One who knows the need and has the power to redeem my ineffectual and just plain wrong choices on spending that which He has lavished on me.

And by His grace, mercifully, He gives me another chance to give away.

One that I want to be used in love for good.

Like the one moon that shines bright, the one sun that sends rays of life giving light, the one husband who loves me and blesses me with his life, and the One Savior who was born in a feed trough for me.

May God take my offering and make it holy and beautiful.

This one Christmas 2012.

Here is one place you can look when considering your gift giving this year. I may see you over there looking around the pages of Compassion Christmas Gift Catalog.

Wherever you choose to give this year, may someone who is hurting and lonely and in need to blessed.

Merry Days of Christmastime to each one of you, sweet readers.

click the link below to visit Compassion International’s Christmas Gift Catalog:

http://www.compassion.com/catalog.htm?referer=128060

Linking with Laura and Ann today.

Bathed In Light

December 7, 2012 ~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 3 Comments

Sometimes, more often than not, very often, well you can determine the frequency of it in your own life, an experience in the physical happens first and then it seeps all lit up into the spiritual. Or it frames the spiritual with clarity and precision.

It takes hearing and living this seven times seventy for it to shine its light of truth on my little world.

A gifted teacher of the Word in my world who peeled back layers of understanding for me taught this, said this, focused on this principle for years. And I get it with wave on wave of new ah ha’s.

And all the strings of white lights now make sense. How I go back to the corner store, the one in another zip code where I can be dirty from cleaning house and pray to remain anonymous. As if that weren’t broken irony in and of itself; my hiding while seeking light. To try and hide the dirt and hope to not be recognized, pitiful, dirty me.

I understand why I peel back the layers of the bills, green with faces of men in government, to add more light to our darkness. Add layers of light. Find another dark corner to light up.

How the corners of the house are lit and warm and white, hoping to reflect holy. Searching for glimpses of His glory. Looking to capture His Love in our home, His warm redemptive beauty.

And when I lay down at night and when I rise in the morning, there is all this Light. And it was born in that dark barn. It lit up the world with bright Hope. Changing us from a shadowy dark people into a place where there is living breathing Light.

Transforming us and chasing away the darkness for once and for all and forever. White, a bright symbol of a Radiant Savior, for a few weeks, blazing trails on the hearts of the broken to dwell in us for eleven other months. In celebration of all He gave in coming to us in the middle of the bleak winter of our lives.

We wonder what it is in our DNA that wants to run the cords around the home, plug into the outlets for more and more of the bright. To run from the shadows of the dark and dingy and the hiding places into the Light of New Life.

To wake to Light, to live our days in Light, to go to bed with Light.

Doesn’t our soul long for more of the bright Light that came to a lost and desperate world.

We celebrate in ways which falter and fail in their dim replica of His brilliance. What this love of Jesus, this shining Savior, this Christ light, a Bright Hope Jesus, brought into the dark world. We try to come up with things to look like holy to point to his blindingly brilliant love.

The lights are a way to shine today to symbolize what is truly eternal in His Love.

Why would we live dim dark dank shadowy hidden lives when we can walk into the Light– and stay there.

I look at the strings of lights and see the physicality of the spirituality of The Light of The World.

And I long to leave my lights up all year long, oh how I dread the grays of the Januarys of the soul. I dread the grays. Dread the dark. Its shallow breathing, heaviness. Its call to come and hide. To cower in sin and cover up.

So while we walk out Advent and step into that glorious Christmas Day, I want to soak in His Light, bask in His glory, and seek Him on all the dark days of my messy living

And I don’t have to keep the lights up all year because He came in the dark of night to bring Light to a dying world.

Nothing can dim that fact, or take from it, or lesson the brightness of His radiant glory. Even when the cords and strands go back to their dark dusty attic to lay boxed in cardboard. To wait to shine again next year. To point to Him.

Grateful dear Lord for your Light in my darkness.

Grateful that you infuse Light into the bloodstream of our very lives.

And that you call us to live in this brilliant place of radiant grace.

Where even without hundreds of chords of light streaming white, imitating in a fragile failing way Your Beauty, we will have all the Light we could ever need.

We have the streaming brilliance of our Savior.

Amen? Amen.

Now

December 6, 2012December 6, 2012 ~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 4 Comments

Now looks radiant, dressed in white, holy moment

Pregnant with possibility

Hope

Expectant flesh and bone

Deliverer of new life, new mercies

And she is fragile, tender, a living breathing paradox

She must be opened, spent

Used up, poured out to manifest her full worth

What is not gathered up and lived out, does not roll over

And accumulate in

A pile of tomorrow,

No gathering of nows, saved and stockpiled

For a four week vacation

Now beats to the rhythm of sweet urgency

Though a lady

She waits for all to come to her, in the tick tock minutes

As hands on clock can not keep still

They must swing around, keep the beat

Clockwise, clock steady

So now

Compels us to be fully present in the sea of possibility

Open the curtain, unwrap

The crinkle bright shiny of her dressing,

New

Unveil the waiting

And live with her, rejoicing.

Now.

Creating beauty out of the given.

Seeking the buried right under the surfaces of her linen coverings

Wrapping our hearts in the warmth of her pleasant embrace.

Looking for all that hangs from the tree of her offering

For the picking, the gracious taking

And the generous release

Now are the days of our lives

Now are the days of our full blown living

God gifts generously as this earth turns, tides break, and hearts beat

All eyes on her, spotlight shines bright on her

Center stage

Act one begins

The play of life

The times of your lives

Thank and live

In the Advent of our nows

And stand with loud applause

Sing sweet praise

At all that is

Worthy of a hallelujah chorus

Of praises

Now.

Joining Emily for her Imperfect Prose

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