Questions

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.

STOP and ask for directions…

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Don’t miss the place of growth when you are focused on the myopic view of tasks that need to be accomplished.

What’s your focus?


Spring Cleaning in all areas of your life?

Setting new goals for a new year?


What areas need an ‘about face’ action?


Stop doing what your doing and heading in the direction your heading.

STOP, just turn around and ask for directions.

The frantic pace of searching in the wrong directions, turning left then turning right in the panicked mindset of trying to do your best or ‘getting things right’ Just press pause. Ask and seek guidance, don’t get caught in the habit of trying to figure things out on your own.

Where do I go when I am confused, tired, happy, joyful? At all times where do I know the greatest source of wisdom is for deciding the next steps in the journey called life?

Wisdom found in the life of Jesus, recorded in the Bible. Guidance found in these timeless and life giving words. Encouragement, guidance, hope and the way through is found on each page. The recorded history of God seeing, hearing and responding to His created beings. The road map. The gas station. The gas to fuel the journey. AND Peace for each step.

Pause, consider His road map, listen to the still small voice that calls you to the place of peace. Enter through the doorway Jesus provides and receive all that you need for your journey in life.

stop, look and listen – timeless simple instructions 🙂

Journal entry December 21, 2023 | Stace

End of Day

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This picture is displayed on my computer screen, each day I look at it but I don’t take time to contemplate why I chose the picture and what it means to me.

Today I stopped, looked at the wooden walkway over the water, the beauty of the sunset and towering mountains in the background and immediately thought, “Don’t walk off the end!” and “No, if I walk off the end Jesus will catch me or I’ll walk on water.”

In this context the picture means ‘trust’ and is a call to trust when logic would tell me I  cannot walk on water, nor will Jesus catch me. (Matt. 14:22-33) Therein lies faith and hope, faith that the Lord is true to His word and hope that what we cannot see is more real than what we perceive with our eyes. These are deep concepts from a simple glance and stare at a picture.

I don’t want to be assumptive of the Lord in the fact that I would walk on water, simply if the Lord asked me to come to him and I needed to walk on water to obey His command – then of course He would provide a way. In this trust, obedience, hope and faith mingle together, along with the relationship build on hearing and recognizing His voice. (John 10:25-30)

The life of faith is not easy, nor is it too difficult, God the master teacher knows exactly what we are able to accomplish with His help and strength. He is our creator, provider and the lifter of our heads. (Genesis 1:1; Psalm 34; Psalm 139) He is God, my lack of faith reveals my lack of trust in a perfect provider God. Even in the position of needing to trust- He meets us to help us when we call out to him (Psalm 18:6)  in humble recognition that we are not sufficient- but in Him we are completely sufficient when we ask and are willing to receive His help. (Romans 16:2)

I gaze into the picture and continue to contemplate: Is it only in the sunset of our days that we realize how intimately caring our God is towards us? How the sacrifice of the birth and the suffering of the cross are both redemptive acts for the hearts and souls of humankind? (John 3:16) That our God, the only God, is very much aware of our desperate need of Him. That it is that deep cries to deep (Psalm 42:7) when our soul is vexed within us and peace is not to be found, only do we locate complete peace when we find our home and being in a supreme God, the maker of the Universe? (Isaiah 26:3)

What do I see in the pictured wooden walkway, wooden end with a lake of water and with an end of day sunset? I see hope and beauty. I see faith, trust, obedience, submission and strength. Most of all I see a place of the redemptive work of God, a place and scene that seems at its finish but truly representing a beginning. A place to sit in peace, rest in His handiwork and know that I am fully loved because I am fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:12-13)

-Stacey Britton
December 28, 2015 Journal Entry

Strengths are Weaknesses?

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Have you ever heard the phrase, “Your strengths are also your weaknesses?” or “When you are given a gift you are responsible to use the gift and not hide it from others?” I have heard those two sayings my entire life.

The first statement encompasses knowing yourself and using balance in your life. The second statement also include self-knowledge but also acknowledges the fact that our creator is a gracious giving God and empowers us with gifts to tend, to grow, to train, to become – a challenge not to just sit by and coast through life but to keep our eyes and ears open for the next thing He wants to teach us.

Have you ever heard the statement that there are “seasons of life” it comes from Ecclesiastes which is a book in the Bible and was written by the wisest man on earth, King Solomon. People came from miles around to ask him for advice, he had it all, wealth, power and the smarts to go along with it. In this book though he came to the conclusion that nothing is new under the sun, that all through his life he had tried this and that and came to the end realizing that it is God that gives and takes away as He sees fit.

Jesus rested, Jesus came away to listen to God the Father and to give His disciples a break from all of the crowds. Then He was rejuvenated and walked on water one time, another time he cast out demons from a man living in a cemetery, another time he calmed a storm on the sea all after his power naps and talk time with his Father. He was and is the perfect shepherd, the perfect model of a balanced, holy life. A human life living ‘full on’ for God in a human body, yet he allowed himself to be brutalized and killed in the most painful way… He is the model for selfless living, for boundaries to those who would try to control him or keep him from accomplishing His mission. He modeled dependence and obedience to God the Father, listening and obeying yet being authentic when things got tough. His mission was accomplished in only three power packed years.

So then I ask myself, how do I live the Christ like life in my longer life span without burning out. Sabbaths day rest. Simple but to the point. Simple but everything in my sphere of influence shouts out my name “come and help me” silencing the tyranny of the urgent to say yes to the BEST choices in my life has been and continues to be my life time place of learning and growing. As each year passes I learn that God is truly my sufficiency and when I remain in Him amazing things happen in my life and in the lives of those that I dearly love.
Journal Entry March 29, 2015

What Defines You?

images (35) butterfly in cocooon

Journal Entry – July 20, 2008

It’s not how you behave
when things go well,
but how you behave
when you face trials and disappointments,
that defines you.

 

It’s not how nicely you can treat people
when you face them
but what you say behind their back
when no one is listening
that defines you.

It is not what you think,
but what actually comes
out of your mouth
that defines you.

What Defines You?