So humble the way He came to us, but so precious the path that has led for all of us from that manger.
I thought I was done with Christmas posts for this year, but another has come to mind. It’s to do with Christmas songs again, with another favorite of mine. And it ties into our pastor’s sermon yesterday.
The song is “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”. It’s not quite my favorite Christmas sone, but it’s close: in the top five if not the top three. We didn’t sing it in any church service this year until yesterday. The words were written by Charles Wesley in 1739. The music is by Felix Mendelssohn. According to Hymnary.org, it has been published in 1,242 hymnals. It’s a great hymn for a brass-dominated orchestra. Thous it also sounds good with a string quartet. It sounds especially good when sung by the Celtic Women.
Toward the end of his sermon, Pastor Mark focused on the third verse. Whenever the song is sung, you rarely get into it past the second verse. In fact, while I fell in love with the third verse many years ago, I’d long forgotten those wonderful words:
Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
risen with healing in his wings.
Mild he lays his glory by,
born that we no more may die,
born to raise us from the earth,
born to give us second birth.
There, in language now considered archaic though still understood, is a wonderful message. Why did Christ come to earth? So that God’s purpose in redemption would be fulfilled. So that sinful mankind could be reconciled to God and put on a right and righteous path in a difficult world. How beautifully this verse says that. “…born that we no more may die, born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth.” No preacher has ever said it better than that. No other song has said it in clearer or more melodious language.
Hence, I should really say nothing else. Christmas may have been the day before yesterday, but the Christmas season is still with us. Take a moment to sing “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing”, getting in all three verses (the song actually has more than three), and enjoy the richness of the message.
I’m hardly the first person to write about this. I found a blog post by one Daisy Rosales that was quite well done. It would be well worth your time to pop over there and read it.
Once again, merry Christmas. I continue to say that because we are still in the season. I’m still listening to Christmas carols as I do my work. I hope you do too.
We didn’t bother with a Christmas tree this year, except for the six miniature ones in the Christmas village.
I wrote last year on Christmas day that Lynda and I were having a quiet Christmas. ‘Tis the same this year. It will just be the two of us, the family having all been with us at Thanksgiving. Well, today we still have Rocky, our neighbor’s dog, with us. We’ve been watching him since Sunday while they got away for a pre-Christmas R&R trip.
Rocky is a good dog, but he’s homesick for his own family. They live four lots up the hill from us, three vacant lots in between. Our normal route to walk him takes us by his house, and he expects to be taken inside it. So we pull him along and he gets over it. In the evenings especially he seems restless and wants to go home. Last night was about the best for him settling down without a lot of difficulty.
I’ve always liked to display blue lights at Christmas, but this red lights display up on the next street is very nice.
The walks after dark have been very nice, as well as the early morning ones. Up on the next street, several houses have outdoor Christmas lights. Nice to walk by them and enjoy. On one of those early walks, before this warm front came through, I found the first frost flower I’ve ever seen. I’ve heard about them for a long time, but have never taken a leisurely walk in the right conditions for them to form. Thank you, Rocky, for making that possible.
One thing different this year from last is our church has returned to holding a candlelight Christmas eve service—two of them actually. Last year we elected not to hold them, with the covid pandemic still in its pre-vaccination stage. We are thinking of going to the 4 o’clock service. It will be good to gather with everyone and focus on Jesus’ birth for an hour.
Another difference is we hope to get together with my cousin Greg and his wife Bev. Although living just 8 or 9 miles apart, it’s been two years since we’ve seen each other. Greg’s health is tenuous and they have been taking lots of precautions. They were supposed to come for Thanksgiving, but he wasn’t feeling well and they cancelled. Our plans are to drive around Sunday evening and see Christmas lights. Beyond that nothing is planned. We may get hot chocolate somewhere and sit on the square in Bentonville, enjoying unseasonably warm weather under enough Christmas lights to read by.
Otherwise, we will read much, probably watch some TV, and eat a nice meal of turkey breast, dressing, and roast vegetables. We’ll eat on it for a week. Hopefully we’ll get to walk. Not with Rocky, however. His family returns today. We’ll take him to his house before we go to church. He’ll jump for joy as we open the door, only to be disappointed his family isn’t home yet (but will be soon).
So a merry Christmas to all. Remember the reason we celebrate it.
Many people around here have seen frost flowers, but I never had, until walking Rocky this morning.
Since I retired, Monday isn’t much different from other days. But Monday is my regular blogging day. Here it is 6:30 in the evening, and I suddenly remembered I hadn’t yet posted a Monday blog. So I quickly opened my computer and got to work.
But, I’ve forgotten what I was going to write on next. I need to do another post on The Forest Throne. I need to do a post on the short story I just published, but I don’t feel like it right now. My writing progress post will be for next week. I covered writing groups recently. So what to post?
It’s just a few days before Christmas. We will be here alone again, unless we can get together with my cousin Greg and his wife Bev. We got our Christmas cards done on Saturday and mailed today (except for one or two i realized I forgot). Right now we are dog-watching for our neighbors. Rocky is a good dog to do this with. He’s not overly demanding. Walking him I get more exercise, in smaller bursts, than normal.
Rocky is our house guest right now, and took me out of the house this morning so that I got to see the frost flowers.
Today I took him outside at 6:15 a,m,, it was still dark and I couldn’t see much on our short walk in 26 deg temperature. I took him out again around 9:15 a.m. The temperature was maybe up to 30 deg. On the way back to the house, in the frontage of a wooded lot, I saw a couple of frost flowers. These develop only in certain conditions of temperature and moisture. You have to be out and about at just the right time to see them. This morning was one of those times. If we hadn’t been watching Rocky, I never would have seen them.
Well, this isn’t much of a post, but it’s all I have at 6:30 p.m. on blogging day, but it’s what I have. I’ll try to be better prepared on Friday.
My parents didn’t send religious Christmas cards. These are typical of the leftover cards I’ve been storing for two decades plus, wondering what to do with.
On Tuesday just passed I attended the monthly meeting of the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers. This is a small club of people who enjoy writing letters. The emphasis is on physical letters and pen pals (though for me, e-mails are equally letters). I learned about them around the first of March 2020 and attended their meeting shortly after that at the Bella Vista Library. Then the pandemic hit, and the library closed.
During the pandemic, we didn’t meet for the first few months. After a while they decided to meet outdoors, under the drive-through canopy of a church not too far from my house. We had to bring chairs, and even in the outdoor venue stayed away from each other. We met like that for over a year. Sometimes we cancelled when the weather was too hot or too cold. But it was a way to stay in touch.
The cards have a simple, non-sectarian message.
Even when the library re-opened, at first they wouldn’t allow groups to use the newly-constructed meeting rooms. The problem was a legal one. This is a private library, and the lawyers had some concern about outside groups, even groups sponsored by the library such as ours is, using the facility. They eventually worked that out, and we began meeting there in September.
That’s a long introduction to December’s meeting. We didn’t have a formal program. Rather, we were all to bring old cards to show around. That was perfect for me, because right now I have a lot of old Christmas cards out of boxes, making a mess of our house. These are cards, as seen in the photo at the beginning of this post, that I found at my dad’s house back in 1998. They appear to be remnants of cards my parents sent in the 1950s. You buy a box of 25 cards and use 22 out of it, putting the rest aside to use next year. When that comes around you buy another box of 25 and use 23 out of it, totally forgetting that you have three left over from last year. Now you have five left over. On and on it goes. A decade later you have a fair number of unused Christmas cards.
I’ve had these remnant cards in a box in the storeroom for all these years, sorted into their own large envelope, wondering what to do with them. I think there are between 35 and 40 of them, but only 4 envelopes. Last year I came to the conclusion we should send them as our Christmas cards next year (meaning now). Since these are a special size, without envelopes, what could we do?
The template, perfected on the third try and already put into use.
Well, for our meeting next month, the letter writing group is making envelopes as a craft project, and will share them around. We are to make 12 envelopes. If we choose to, of course. Now, I’m not an arts and craft person, and making envelopes as a craft project didn’t excite me. I pretty much decided I wouldn’t do the envelopes. Then I realized, I have a need to make envelopes, to use to send these cards.
Ah ha! A practical need is not really arts and crafts. It’s an environmentally friendly activity. Rather than trash those old cards, I can make envelopes to send them in. And, rather than use clean sheets of paper for the envelopes, I can use paper from the re-use stack, printouts of my writing that I planned on using the back to print other things on.
The first envelope off the assembly line. I like it. Not sure the wife will, however.
So yesterday, I took the time to create a template. That took a while. I used two sheets of paper to create envelopes before I had it right. Then I used one to trace the template on cardstock and cut it to size. I then made one envelope and tested it with the cards. It was perfect: just a little over-sized as I wanted it to be, since the size of the cards varies a little.
Envelope creation began immediately. I’m not sure Lynda will agree that sending these cards in an envelope created on the back of my writing sheets will be a good idea. No problem. If she doesn’t, I’ll just make others from clean paper and use these for the letter writers meeting in January.
It’s as close to being artsy-craftsy as I’ll ever come.
Christmas music has been filling the airwaves for a month now, though becoming progressively louder and more ubiquitous with each day. I enjoy it, both the sacred and the secular. The Christmas music we had growing up is still pleasant to me. We had the Gene Autry album, the Arthur Godfrey album, and a couple of others I sort of remember. We had primarily albums of secular holiday music. For Christmas hymns we went to church. I don’t believe there was any all-Christian radio in the 50s and 60s, so we didn’t get a steady diet of the songs of the season.
But this memory is about one particular song. I first heard it in 1964 at the Christmas program in our weekly assembly in junior high. I was in 7th grade then. At this assembly, Faith Farnum, a 9th-grader, sang “The Birthday of a King”. Faith was a wonderful singer and regularly sang at assemblies. It was the first time I had ever heard the song, and I’ve never forgotten it. It doesn’t get a lot of airtime at Christmas, and I don’t know why. In fact, I have never, in the 57 Christmases that have passed (including the one that is rapidly passing) since that first time, heard it sung live again.
As beautiful as the song is, and as simple yet rich as the lyrics are, I don’t understand how it remains so obscure. Whenever I mention it to someone, they have never heard it or heard of it. When I do a search for it, I find recordings of it by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, Judy Garland, Kelli O’Hara, and a number of others. It was once in the Baptist hymnal and, for all I know, may still be.
“The Birthday Of A King” was written in 1918 by William Harold Neidlinger. His biography at hymnary.org is as follows.
William Harold Neidlinger USA 1863-1924. Born at New York, NY, he studied with organists Dudley Buck and C C Muller (1880-90) …. He played the organ at St Michael’s Church in New York City. He also conducted the Amphion Male Chorus and the Cecilia Women’s Chorus in Brooklyn, and the Treble Clef Club and Mannheim Glee Club in Philadelphia, PA. He taught in the music department of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences. He went on to study with E Dannreuther in London (1896-98) then worked in Paris as a singing teacher until 1901. In 1897 he married Alice Adelaide Maxwell Sypher, and they had a son, Harold. Returning to American in 1901, he settled in Chicago, IL, where for several years he was one of the prominent singing teachers. He wrote music for a religious mass…published a comic opera…another opera…a cantata…two song books,..[etc.] …He became interested in child psychology and nearly abandoned music. He even established a school for handicapped children in East Orange, NJ, where he taught his theories of musical pedagogy and speech and vocal therapy. He wrote several secular songs and edited a number of vocal songbooks, especially for children. He was a theorist on musical methods and education. He died at Orange, NJ. He was an author, composer, and lyricist.
Quite impressive.
Once I learned that so much music was available on Youtube for just the cost of listening to a few ads, I went looking for this one Christmas, and every Christmas since. I haven’t so far this year but will do so today as I go about my work in The Dungeon. I’m anxious to once again hear that beautiful refrain:
Alleluia, O how the angels sang. Alleluia, how it rang. And the sky was bright with a holy light. ‘Twas the birthday of a King.
Here’s a link to the performance by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. It’s a little different than the arrangement Faith sang to, but still good. Happy listening.
Well done, good and faithful servant. We will miss you, but rejoice at your current status with your heavenly Father.
Death seems to be all around of late. My sister not so long ago. Church friends earlier in the year. Classmates from high school. Something like 80 out of 725 people listed in our senior yearbook are now dead. Just this morning I learned of the death of a former pastor’s daughter, who I was working with as I write a church history. Writing remembrances should be getting easier, but it’s not.
On Dec. 7, our friend from church, Gary Borchert, crossed the river from life to death. Here is his obituary. Only 73 years old, but a life well-spent.
Gary and Sue came into our lives around 1995-96. They visited our church one Sunday. We did not meet them at the service. Lynda and I were at that time part of a ministry that went to the homes of those who visited the church and gave them a small gift, maybe a coffee mug and a jar of jam. We got Gary and Sue. I remember going to their home, then in Rogers, and the time we spent with them. They were very open to our visit and kept us there an hour or so, just talking. They were horse people, having acreage at their house, which back then was at the edge of Rogers. It wouldn’t be long before the city started closing in around them and they did the wise thing of selling their property and moving to a house in Bella Vista.
They became faithful attenders at and members of our church. They formed the nucleus of the “Amen Corner” from a row up front, always worshiping with abandon, not worrying about who was behind them, watching them. At one point the pastor asked them to attend the start of the second worship service (after they had been in the first), for it was a little dead and they were an example to others on how to praise God without concern of what people thought of you. In our adult Sunday school class, he was always ready with a comment or question.
Gary’s life was one of accomplishment. He served his country in the Air Force and was in Vietnam. I remember a Sunday School class I taught around Christmastime one year. Gary and Sue were in it. Dealing with Christmas memories, I asked, “So where were you at Christmas 1969?” (or a year either side of that) Most of us were in high school or younger. Gary answered that with one word: Danang. What a way to spend Christmas.
Gary had a voice for radio, and he worked in that industry for many years. He took part in dramas at church, and, if I remember correctly, narrated from time to time. His most famous role in a church drama was as Dr. No, even shaving his head for the part. Another role he played was being father to his grandson after their daughter’s untimely death. This would prove to be a challenge, one that Gary and Sue met with grace, and, when called for, tough love.
Somewhere along the way, after we met them, Gary became involved in a workplace accident. I don’t remember the particulars, but it injured his back. He struggled with this the rest of his life. The first struggle was with the insurance company, or maybe it was with workers’ compensation. I played an unwitting part in that. While he hobbled on foot as much as he could, Gary was trying to get a motorized cart to help him get around. We had a Sunday school class blog at the time, and after seeing Gary struggle to walk one Sunday, I posted that it was good to see him walking. I meant it as an encouragement to him. The insurance company saw it and said, “Ah ha! He doesn’t need a motorized cart.” They eventually straightened it out and he got the cart, but the bureaucratic struggle added to the physical struggles.
An example of Gary’s willingness to serve, and his desire to be of use even with his limited mobility, was Easter Sunday 2010. We were in the midst of a parking lot renovation. Who does that when Easter Sunday is upon you, right? But that’s the way it happened. I was in charge of getting those improvements done and, knowing the condition it would be in that day, worked with our pastoral staff and the men’s ministry to have at least five parking attendants for each service, helping people to navigate to the parts of the lot that were usable. Gary responded to the request for volunteers and showed up early that day, in his motorized cart, and waved cars to a certain row until it was full. Then he pulled forward and waved them to the next row. He showed us all what Christian service was all about.
A great couple, lovers of Jesus, servants in the church.
Over the years, Gary dealt with health issues and had operations and times in the hospital with severe infections. The pain from his injuries, complications from them, and loss of mobility made life difficult for him. He met the challenges. Though, he wasn’t always the best patient. He would resist going to the hospital when Sue thought he needed to and wanted to be discharged before it was wise. I remember a talk I had with him about that, reminding him that his wife was a registered nurse and had a better understanding of his health than he did. He did much better after that.
On one screen, I have Gary’s picture up. On this screen what I type. Gary, we will miss you. Sue and Kody will miss you. But we rejoice that you are now pain free, infection free, and that your radio voice is competing with the choir of angels as you narrate the stories of God and His Son Jesus. You have now heard the words that the rest of us will someday hear, a day that gets closer for all of us: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Come share in your Master’s happiness.”
I keep making mention of my novel-in-progress. Tentatively titled The Forest Throne, it will be a young adult novel—meaning it is for teenagers. And I’ve been meaning to say more about it, but seemed to have too much on my mind to concentrate on a post about it.
In this post, I’ll talk mainly about the genesis of the book. In a future post I’ll talk a little about the story.
Before they constructed trails near our house, if, when the grandchildren came to visit, you wanted to go deep into the woods, the only way to do so was down the hill behind our house into the valley, called a “holler” around here. I think Ephraim, our oldest grandchild, was 3 or 4 when we did that for the first time. As the other kids got older, several of us would do this. Once you go down the hill, there’s no going back up. Or, should I say going back up is much too difficult. So we would hike down the channel of the hollow until we hit a road and take the road back to the house. While that meant a longer uphill leg, the road is definitely easier than the rocky, leaf-strewn hill. Once the trail construction began in late 2019 and was completed in early 2020, we never go down the hill anymore.
But I prate.
Sometime around 2017 (I think it was), Ephraim, by then 9-years-old, and I went down the hill. For some reason his two siblings then old enough to be with us stayed at the house. We usually have to hunt around to find a place to get down into the channel of the holler. One time we were working our way upstream on the bank, looking for that place to drop down to the channel, when we passed a depression in the hillside that looked a bit like a chair. One of us, I don’t remember if it was Ephraim or me, said it looked like a throne, a throne in the woods, or the forest.
That’s where the name came from. We mused about whether it was natural or manmade. And I began musing about how it could be worked into a book. A plot came to mind. I ran that plot by Ephraim. He said it sounded good, and so I put it in the writing queue. It finally came to the top of the queue last June.
That’s the genesis. The rest will have to wait for another post. I took a photo of the throne when we went back one time, but I’m not sure I can find it on my phone. Thus, I have no illustration for this post. You’ll just have to wait a while for it.
I’m writing this on December 1st, for publishing on December 3rd. November wasn’t too bad of a month for writing progress, despite the time off for Thanksgiving activities with the family. Here’s how I did compared to the goals I set on November 1st.
Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday. I believe I accomplished this without missing a regular posting day.
Attend my writers groups this month. That will be about six meetings if I make all of them. I attended all these meetings, a total of 5, two of which were on-line.
Continue formatting work on the church Centennial book. With luck, and a few good hours, it will be finished when Dec 1 rolls around. I made progress on this. The essential formatting is done, though I’m still waiting on two outside contributions and a few more photos. Final formatting is impossible until I get those.
More work on The Forest Throne. I’ll even set a word goal on this: 10,000 words more than I have now. I had several good sessions of working on this. I didn’t quite make may word goal, however, adding 9,400 for the month. Still, that’s not bad.
Begin the process of revamping my website. I don’t really have that much to do on it, mainly have a new landing page and move my bio to its own page. I ought to be able to achieve that. This I also did. I spent a day or two on this: refamiliarizing myself with the menus for making changes; adding photos; moving and adding text. I now have a proper landing page, a proper bio page, and have updated almost everything on the site to be current. I still want to make a couple of changes to some of the pages but see no hurry in doing so.
So, what about December? It actually looks like a quiet month in the Todd household, so I hope to achieve much with my writing.
As always, blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays.
As always, attend meetings (in person and on-line) of my writing groups. I’m going to drop one group, as I don’t think I’m contributing much to it and am not sure I agree with the direction they are going. I also suspect some meetings of the groups may be cancelled around Christmas.
Publish the short story I finished in September. Busyness has kept me from applying my mind to creating the cover and doing the publishing tasks. I’ve waited long enough; time to get it done.
Continue work on The Forest Throne. I’m at a point in the book where the writing is more difficult, since I’m dealing with speech and mannerisms spanning three different time eras. So I’m not going to set any word goal. Let me instead set a working-sessions goal. I want to work on it no less than 15 times by the end of the month.
Assuming I receive the two outside contributions I’m waiting on, and find the last photo or two I feel I’m missing, I’ll set a goal of completely finishing the formatting of this, 100 percent finish. That will mean that publishing tasks will happen in January.
Work on two Bible studies—or maybe three. One I started back in February or March this year, and I have quite a bit done on it. I’d like to get that into publishing shape. Maybe this month I can dust it off, read where I left off and add some words. The other two are new, ones that I anticipate teaching next year. One I have outlined but not really developed. My goal for it is to get it fully developed and in teachable condition. The other is a “sequel” to the one from earlier this year. It’s not yet outlined, however. My goal for it for it for December is to get it fully outlined, and maybe start developing it a little.
I think I will leave it at that. That’s quite a bit to get done. Let’s see how I do on it.
Christmas at the Outlet store in downtown Providence, probably 1953. Edward came along in January 1954.
On Saturday, November 27, 2021, my sister, Norma Lilly Todd, left this world for the next, the heavenly one, after a long, long illness. You may find her obituary here.
She was 16 months older than me, two years ahead of me in school. Born Sept 5, 1950 in Providence, RI, she was a premie by at least a month, maybe more. This would show up years later in her health problems.
Four maternal generations at Norma’s christening, winter of 1950-51
We were raised in Cranston, RI, joined two years after my birth by our brother Edward. Norma, as the oldest, was the one to one supply childhood names for our grandparents, Gar and Grime—names that stuck forever. She established the pattern of the Todd children being scholars (a pattern Edward broke, not because he lacked smarts, but because he had to carve out a different territory for himself).
When Mom died in 1965, Norma was 14, I was 13, and Edward was 11. A lot of the burden of the family duties fell on her. Of course, Mom was so sick leading up to her death that we all were already doing most of the chores a mother would do, including Dad taking on much of the cooking. But Norma probably had a greater burden than Edward and me.
Norma graduated with honors along the way, from Cranston High School East in 1968. She went on to Rhode Island College, graduating in 1972 with a B.S. in Elementary Education.
The family, one Sunday about to embark for church.
She discovered that teaching young children really wasn’t her calling, and instead went into retail, working at a Pier One Imports close to our house. They offered her a management position in Evansville, Indiana. So she became the first of the fledglings to fly the coop in, if I remember correctly, November 1973. I did the same in June 1974, moving to Kansas City.
Daddy’s little girl
Once we moved away from each other, and in the age back when long-distance telephone was still expensive, communications became infrequent and visits even more so. I drove from KC to Evansville to visit her twice before I married, and she flew to KC twice to visit Lynda and me after we married. Since, over the years, we made many trips from KC or Arkansas to Rhode Island, we stopped often in Evansville to see her.
At Mom’s grave, 1965
Norma’s health was never good, and she didn’t have a lot of strength. At some point, maybe around 1990-91, she left her retail management position—which involved her unloading delivery trucks—and went to work as a receptionist at her church, a job she held until her retirement around three or four years ago. Her connection to that is an interesting story, one that I had a part in. When I visited her in October, 1974, I witnessed to her about my conversion experience (from being a nominal, Christian-in-name-only to being born again). After my trip, she wrote me a letter saying thanks but no thanks. It was less than a year later that she sent me a card, saying something on front like, “I meant to call, I meant to write, I meant to visit, but I didn’t so…” and then, inside, “…I’m praying for you.” In that card she wrote about her conversion. Needless to say, I hopped in the car as soon as I could and visited her over the weekend, including Sunday morning service at Bethel Temple.
Norma’s high school graduation photo, 1968, Cranston High School East
Norma was a girl scout growing up, active in that throughout her school years. As an adult, her interests outside of work and church included crafts, especially making greeting cards. Each birthday and holiday we received a homemade, personalized card from her.
Norma never married. If she had boyfriends along the way she didn’t tell me about them.
About 10-15 years ago, she called to say she had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. In the course of the examinations, they discovered she had only 40 percent lung capacity, most likely as a result of her premature birth. Due to her general health condition, they would not operate for her cancer. They treated it by radiation, and she was considered a cancer survivor.
A more recent photo, probably from the early 2000s.
But her health deteriorated over the years as her knees wore out and she battled the bulge, like everyone in our family did. She had been confined to a wheelchair, though still living at home. Various friends looked in on her. It was August this year that she took a turn for the worse, spending the rest of her time in hospitals, rehab, and a nursing home. When we last talked by phone, she requested that we not come out and see her. “We went our separate ways long ago,” she said. We reluctantly honored her wish. She had her after-death arrangements made, which included cremation and no services.
Norma is survived by me, our half-sister Deb Harris, six nephews and nieces, many cousins, and a host of friends, mainly in Evansville. I want to give special recognition to Bob and Ellan, the friends who have given her much help and lots of time over the years, especially lately.
On our last visit, in Evansville in October 2015
A popular response to the death of a loved one is to say they have joined so and so in heaven and is now looking down on us. I’m not sure that’s biblical, though it may be comforting. But I do know that’s where Norma is now, because of her faith in Jesus. She fought the good fight; she finished the race; she kept the faith. She has now heard those words that all who love Jesus want to hear: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter now into the joy of the Lord.”
Eliajah and me. Loves to jump on me or have me read books to him.
On Sunday, we picked up our son and his husband at the airport. On Monday our daughter and husband and their four children drove in. So we have had a houseful. But it all ends tomorrow.
Because of them all leaving the day after Thanksgiving, we decided to make our Thanksgiving meal on Wednesday. Otherwise, there would have been too many leftovers for the wife and I to finish on our own. It was a great feast, even with leaving out the corn. On Monday our son prepared a nice meal of chicken breasts, pasta, and broccoli. Tuesday the four younger adults (I don’t think I can call them “young” any more as they are now at the lower end of middle-aged), and I prepared Grandpa’s Mythical Sandwich along with cabbage and carrots. That, along with a nice breakfast casserole and some blueberry muffins our daughter brought and a fruit salad Lynda made, and we have eaten very well.
Morning reading time worked very well.
I instituted a new rule for this visit: No screens in the morning until they had read 30 minutes in a physical book. They could pick any book(s) in the house. Ephraim chose a Dickens book off our shelves, the one with the Christmas stories. Ezra grabbed the first volume of The Lord of the Rings. Elise picked a Chronicles of Narnia book, but then changed her mind when her uncles gave her a book as an early Christmas present, a book with famous women’s stories, I think. I actually haven’t been able to look at it much. She read it in the first two days and began re-reading it today. It was kind of hard to get the youngest, Elijah, to participate.
With more work after this photo was taken, the fort is 3 posts short of being done, including this year’s repairs and modifications.Ezra worked hard on the fort and the path leading to it.
We worked on the fort in the nearby woods, and it is done, all but three posts. That included finishing one wall destroyed when a tree fell on it and moving one entrance and closing another. Ezra and I also worked on the path to the fort, marking it with logs. They didn’t play much it in, but I have come to realize that the fun is in the building.
Lots of board games were played, the grandparents not really participating. But the grandkids had fun at it. Little Elijah let me read to him several times.
Thanksgiving is in the books for 2021. It was the first time for the whole family to be together since Thanksgiving 2019. May there be many more such times.
Board games resulted in much fun, cutthroat as it was.
