Eternity

What’s Important this Christmas?

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What’s Important? Knowing Jesus. You might be rolling your eyes at this point, I get that. You might want to click escape and erase these sentences from your mind. But they will stick, because Jesus gently calls, consistently calls and guides us whether we like it, want it or think we need it 🙂 He is LOVE, love calls to the dark parts, the holes deep within that we try to fill with so many other things.

What’s important? Who’s important this Christmas? Might be a better question.

I’ve been in survival mode for awhile now, healing really, becoming, reclaiming what I thought was lost and realizing it wasn’t really lost at all. I was in a ‘pause’ mode for a year. A year of solitude and literal silence.

A year ago, last Christmas I was in the grips of a deep, survival struggle. 

I began this 50newbeginnings site in December 2013. Ten years to date, writing each year, adding pages and stories, chapter books in edit form, sharing my life with a world I did not know and may never know. You might be reading this thinking – where is she going with this post? Hang in there with me!

December 2013 I held my breath and began this website journey with a Christmas snap shot of my family’s traditions and moments of sacred community. Last year, the ninth year, I was silent, I was silent for more months than I would like to admit. Not only in writing but also in communicating, strengths and freedoms had become difficult and physically painful. My life stripped down to the daily check off list so I would and could remember what I had accomplished. Hours segmented and ordered with repetition to rebuild the synapses connecting thoughts and motions in my brain that had been changed. I was rebuilding, or maybe just building.

This Christmas 2023 I begin again the journey of sharing and being known through words and thoughts.

Today I choose to share a message of HOPE for all of you reading this today – what ever day it is.
The bottom line?
Don’t give up!

Healing comes in surprise packages and sometimes in ways we do not see nor do we recognize. I’m learning another name for healing is growth. Like a plant when it is pruned and shaped by a Master Gardner, so I too, am shaped each day by my Maker, the God and only creator of the Universe, his son Jesus, guides my path – through the thick and thin of life – through times of change and drastic ‘make-overs’ not unlike the type accomplished at a SPA 🙂 and similar in purpose. A pause, a buffing, moisturizing applied to dry spots, steaming out the impurities of the flesh and renewing with moments of rest whether by message, quiet meditation or listening to music. My soul needed a re-set just as the break provided at said SPA experiences. 

I’m not the person I was a year ago, or even yesterday, that is healthy!

It is as it is supposed to be, growing, and expanding, learning from mistakes. Each day becomes a battle for me even yet, life is not easy, nor should it be. Struggles build us, mold us, teach us what we need to know.

Who we need to know.

Why we need to know.

Jesus is the way the truth and the life, waiting for you, calling you to come. 

Hear His voice calling you to come, receive His love purchased by dying on a cross to take all the guilt and sin in your life upon Himself, to make the way clear to Himself. No barriers, no need to do a better job, no need to try to be perfect in your own strength but become excellent receivers of HIS strength, HIS power, HIS joy – receiving and giving hope in the deepest, darkest pit of separation from the Living God, the one who created you, the one who calls you with the HOPE of eternal life of peace, no suffering, no more crying no more pain. In this world we will have all of those things, but Jesus showed us the way. God becoming human, knowing and experiencing life outside of heaven. Jesus stands in heaven now, beside the Father God, reminding God the Father of the price HE paid, to cover and cleanse our souls so we could

Know WHO is important this Christmas. Jesus.

He came to His own people and His own people rejected Him, but to anyone – anyone – who believes in His name, that He is the Son of the Living God, to this person He will give eternal life.

don’t miss the WHY of Christmas -learning of the one who loves you

don’t miss the WHAT of Christmas-the fact that Jesus is your ticket to eternal living life abundantly

don’t miss the WHO of Christmas – Jesus

In the Bible, different versions use language that describes and tells the story – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, found in the middle of the collection of stories are a great place to start, they told His story – THE Story of Jesus, come to earth for YOU and ME.  The other books point to Jesus’ coming and how God tried for so many centuries to love a people that did not understand Him, Jesus came so we could SEE the Father God’s love for us. 

For God so loved the world that he gave is only son, Jesus, that whoever believes in Him will not die to an eternal place of separation from God, but that they would have eternal life WITH God – beginning NOW with the step of belief.  (John 3:16 in The Bible)

What’s Important THIS Christmas? Knowing that Jesus is waiting just for you, completely seeing and hearing your cries for something more in this life here on earth and offering so much more beyond what we see and hear. Believe. Receive His love. Read His story in the Bible.

Writing as Prayer and Worship

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Writing is like breathing for me, I must exhale the thoughts that ramble in my head and inhale the ideas, thoughts and vision the Lord sends my way via various sources. I must share what I write, if with no one else or nothing else than the ink and paper or computer doc. that I’m using now. The multitude of feelings, thoughts and expressions of what God is doing in my life must immerge or I would be undone.

I cannot really claim anything that I have done in my own strength has changed myself, crying out night after night, year after year, writing in a journal for decades, reading scripture to survive…all those things were a prelude to developing the listening ear that hears, writes and meets with God face to face. I see his people in my mind’s eye, He shares some of His thoughts with me and I write. Sometimes He says to me, “Stacey, just write,” and I obey. I’ve even gone to using the sticky note application on my SmartPhone when ideas and thoughts or pictures and visions come to my mind throughout the day.

As I’ve said before, writing has become as important to me as breathing; it is prayer, my way to communicate with my Father in Heaven. He speaks to me and I return the favor. It has become the conduit of love from me to God and from God to me. When I write all the things that I have not been able to form into speech, instead form into fluent thoughts that immerge as a shining beacon beckoning me homeward.

I write to talk to God, to expose my heart to Him sharing all my hurts, shame, fears, frustrations, and pain. All that is known or revealed to me is dumped through ink and paper back into His hands. All His love, joy, peace and patience are refilled like an ink pen is filled with ink by being dipped into the ink well. I am the ink the Lord is the pen and the ink well source. He replenishes me each day as I ask Him to cleanse and make me new. I pour out myself onto the pages the ink becoming words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs organizing my life into the patterns of a story with beginning, middle and end. The beginning has been written and the end I know, it is the middle with which I write to become.

Writing is like listening to a beautiful piece of intricately composed music, the melody enters then the harmony followed by the percussion and bass, rich sounds, full sounds, sheer pleasure. Writing has become like music for me, a form of worship for my Lord, the King and the lover of my soul. I write for Him, I write for us, I write to share parts of my being that the words I speak could never utter so eloquently nor so boldly.

In my solitude and separation during the past five months of a debilitation disease in which the only non-pain filled motion was that of typing on my computer, my God orchestrated sabbatical, I found a peace that I had not thought possible. I have found a steadfast love that enfolds and encompasses me as well as brings me face to face with who I am in God. I am His, fully loved, cherished and complete through Christ’s blood shed on the cross. As a child I was told that if I was the only person on the earth, Christ would have come to earth, suffered, died and risen again just for me. In my place of healing, right now, where I am, at this moment, I embrace that love, soak it up and cheer loudly – YEAH GOD!!!

I began writing long ago to record my thoughts about daily life, now I write to record daily life as I think about God and as God thinks about me.
August 28, 2012

I’m Ready, Are You?

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It occurred to me today that I have just been given the opportunity of a lifetime! A rare glimpse of possibilities that could make a great impact on others lives…

But alas I didn’t finish the post and I have no idea what I was thinking, so maybe it wasn’t such a lifetime opportunity after all?

But really, isn’t each day the opportunity of a lifetime? After all we only have the moment we are living right at this time? So in a way, each day is the “opportunity of a lifetime…” A sobering thought somehow. The last word I uttered could really be my last. The last conversation…could become the last memory someone has of me. The last day…an opportunity to leave a wonderful impact  on someone.

I’m glad I laugh a lot, smile a lot, and say nice things a lot – not always though. Sometimes I ask tough questions, give the ‘teacher look’ or just put my hand up and my head down to stop whatever action is happening at the moment. This train of thought is causing me to consider my days, to treasure those I care about and to not waste any ‘moment.’ Gently holding all yet ready to leave at a moment’s notice. I’m ready…are you?

I’m ready because Jesus is my rock, my source of living, my Savior and my Lord. Because He is the center of who I am and what I am about. Do you know Him? He knows you. He longs to be your Lord, find Him in the Bible. John 3:16 says that God loved  everyone, He loves you, so He sent Jesus, and those that believe in Jesus will have eternal life with Him. Believe that Jesus is the son of God, ask Him to show you who He is and He will!