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30
Dec
2017
Last New Year’s Eve, we welcomed the new year on Mountain Time. At 10:45 here in the Pacific Time zone, someone yawned. Yawns are contagious. (Even just reading this, you’re tempted to yawn, aren’t you?) By some miraculous consensus, we all agreed that if it was midnight in Alberta, that was good enough for us.
The New Year is traditionally a time for Resolutions. I’ve never had much success keeping my New Year’s Resolutions. Most are hopelessly idealistic, like promising to avoid puns. Or to think kindly of Donald Trump.
The only Resolution I’ve ever managed to keep was my resolution, a few years ago, to stop making New Year’s Resolutions.
Now, instead of making rash promises, I look for words of wisdom that might influence my behaviour.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: New Year's Resolutions, Donna Sinclair
27
Christmas is over. Crumpled gift wrap has gone into recycle bins. Santa has settled down for a long winter’s nap, or at least into an easy chair by the hearth, sipping a well-deserved eggnog; Rudolph has been put out to pasture.
And 2018 stands on our doorsteps, finger poised at the doorbell.
What now?
Hymnwriter Jim Strathdee answered that question:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the shepherds have found their way home,
The work of Christmas is begun!
The work of Christmas? Work? Surely you jest! Christmas is about fun, and family, and feasting -- not about work.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Christmas, Strathdee, poets, writers, composers, prophets
23
I don’t recall which shift I had. I do remember that it was pitch black outside. A nightlight in one corner of the room cast a pale yellow glow onto the ceiling. The city slept.
The darkness outside was so thick, it felt solid. The stars were pin-holes in the sky. No birds sang.
I cradled little Rediet in my arms. I tried to synchronize my breathing with hers. I crooned nursery rhymes dimly recalled from my own childhood: the Farmer in the Dell, Three Blind Mice, Frere Jacques... The language was nonsense to her; she had never heard anything but Amharic. But the rumble of my voice resonating in my chest seemed to quiet her.
She looked up at me.
I looked into those coal-black Ethiopian irises, and I knew, deep in my heart, that I could never do anything that would hurt this child. Never.
Tags: Nativity, Ethiopia, adoption, Addis Ababa
20
In those days a decree went out from the Emperors in Washington and Damascus that all the world should be embroiled in civil wars, so that their spheres of influence might be extended. And many were driven from their own towns by bombs and drones and tanks.
A man named Joseph fled from his shattered ruins of his home and business in Syria across the harsh deserts to a refugee camp, where he knew no one. He went with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were in the camp, on their way to anywhere else, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son shortly before dawn, while others slept, in a tent provided by an international aid agency. She wrapped him in her own cloak to keep him warm through the bitter cold of a desert night, and she laid him on the sand, because they had nothing else to put him in.
Tags: Joseph, Mary, baby, Nativity, birth
17
I have a lot of sympathy for Kimberley Jones. You haven’t heard of her? Almost certainly, you have heard of her son, 11-year-old Keaton Jones.
The Facebook post of Keaton, crying in the seat of his mother’s car as she brought him home from school has now had 20 million views, and been featured on newscasts around the world.
A tearful Keaton asked why kids wanted to bully, why they picked on innocent kids, why they poured milk on him. “It’s not okay,” he told his mother’s cell phone. “It’s not their fault they’re different.”
I sympathize with her, because I too had a son who suffered from teasing. And perhaps some bullying. He was born with cystic fibrosis, an incurable, hereditary, and at the time terminal illness.
Tags: bullying, Cystic Fibrosis, Keaton Jones, Kimberley Jones