tree of memories

I know I need to take my Christmas tree down, but I hate to see it go. I love the fragrance of my stately Fraser fir (yes, I can still detect its scent after five weeks), the warm glow of the multi-colored lights, and - most of all - the memories associated with my vast collection of ornaments. One of things I enjoy most about the Christmas season is decorating the tree, since as I pull ornament after ornament out of our green and red plastic storage containers, I am reminded of story after story. 

My most cherished ornaments are the oldest ones in my collection - three glass ornaments with felt designs (1971), a pair of purple felt mittens (1970), and a felt Santa head festooned with sequins (1969) - all handmade my one of my parents' friends. As a teenager, I acquired a UT football player made of dough, so he makes an annual appearance among the branches. The gold glass heart and a purple ball nestled among the needles were acquired in December 1985, ordered from a catalog as Paul and I prepared to celebrate our first Christmas together as husband and wife. Of course, several ornaments were hand-crafted by Chaney  at various points in his childhood, including: a crumbling yellow bell and a green tree, both formed from dough and strung on lengths of green yarn; a gingerbread man made from sandpaper suspended by red yarn; a bell made of an inverted plastic cup with Chaney's picture taped inside; and two green construction paper wreaths featuring photos of Chaney in the center. A delicate glass sand spur hangs near the star - an ornament I procured on one of our spring break visits to Florida's Gulf Coast. The Mickey Mouse head covered in an array of small, colorful bells was a souvenir that I chose when we stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge on our visit to Disney World to celebrate Chaney's 16th birthday in 2006. The majority of the remainder of the ornaments were acquired on family vacations, such as: the moose in the canoe (Maine), the bear on a bicycle (Yellowstone), Santa hiding behind a starfish (Hilton Head), sled dogs in a sleigh (Alaska), Santa riding a whale (Hawaii), a UFO (Roswell, New Mexico), a glass chili pepper (Santa Fe), a tin guitar (Mexico), Santa clinging to the Eiffel Tower (Paris). 

I know the ornaments need to return to their red and green plastic off-season homes. But for at least one more night, I'll enjoy the show and treasure the memories.

silent night

Last week I developed a cough that progressively got worse, and by Saturday night my voice was almost gone. I stayed in bed most of the day Sunday so that I would be able to go to the Carol-Candlelight Service at church that night, even if I couldn't speak louder than a whisper. There is a longstanding tradition that the seniors who are in our Chapel Choir serve as candle-lighters at this service, so I did not want to miss seeing my son and the rest of the Class of 09 - some of whom I first began teaching when they were 4-year-olds - perform their candle-lighting duties. 

Near the end of the service the sanctuary was dark, except for the light of a single candle held by the pastor. The seniors approached the pastor one by one, and after he lit their candles, they fanned out across the sanctuary to their assigned sections. Row by row, the seniors moved through the congregation, lighting the candles of the worshippers who were seated along the aisles, who then passed the light down their pews until every face in the congregation was bathed in candlelight. 

Ironically for me, the song that the choir sang while the seniors lit the candles was "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence." At other points in the service when the congregation was invited to join the choir in singing, I was forced by my infirmity to remain silent, which was very frustrating but also enlightening. First of all, the experience allowed me to empathize with my mother, who lost her voice several months ago due to nerve damage from her chemotherapy. Not being able to sing must be especially frustrating for a woman who entered college on a voice scholarship. Second, the experience gave me the opportunity to focus more intently on the sounds around me - like the Robersons' strong voices coming from the pew behind me or the individual instruments in the Nashville String Machine playing on the platform in front of me. The forced silence was a blessing in disguise that allowed me to worship God in a completely different way. Silent night, holy night.

Christmas is coming!

This has been a crazy month. Wait - let me rephrase that statement. This has been a crazy year. I have spent the entire year thinking, "If I can just make it to [insert date here], then I will be able to take a deep breath and regroup." Yet time after time, these dates arrived and passed and there was still no time for deep breathing. The year has been a blur of activity.

I like to have my Christmas cards in the mailbox as close to December 1 as possible. Today is December 16, and my cards have not yet been mailed. Addressing the cards is one of the things on my "To Do List" today, so if I'm diligent they will be postmarked only 16 days later than I had hoped. Our Christmas tree was delivered on December 2. I hung the ornaments on the tree on December 13. I intend to keep my tree up until well into January to make up for that lost time. In past years, I prided myself on having all my Christmas shopping done prior to Thanksgiving. This year, I didn't buy a single gift until December, and I still have a couple left to procure.

When I was a child, it seemed liked Christmas would never come. The December days dragged by as my anticipation heightened. As an adult, it seems like Christmas comes too soon. December is a blur, and - if I'm not careful - before I know it Christmas Day will have come and gone.

I'm thinking about Mary this morning, and wondering how she perceived the passage of time during the final days of her pregnancy. Did the time fly by for her? Maybe not, since she and Joseph were forced to make a difficult journey to Bethlehem and she must have been extremely uncomfortable on that road trip. Perhaps it did, though, as the young woman hoped and prayed that they could register for the census and make it back home to Nazareth in time to bring her baby into the world in the presence of family and friends. I'll bet those last few hours were a blur - the onset of labor pains, the frantic search for lodging, the birth of a son, the unexpected visit from shepherds. A year earlier, Mary could not have imagined this astonishing series of events, yet she embraced her God-given role with grace. "Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished" (Luke 1:45).

self-denial

Two weeks ago, I started a Monday afternoon Bible study in my home for the seniors who I work with at church. We are focusing on spiritual disciplines for this study, which will continue through the spring semester, and I am using Soul Tending: Life-Forming Practices for Older Youth and Young Adults by Kendra Creasy Dean and Ron Foster as our guide. At our first gathering, I read through a list of 40+ spiritual disciplines from the book and asked the students to jot down which ones piqued their interest. Their lists surprised me.

This Monday we focused on self-denial. In addition to talking about the practice during our time together, the students were given homework assignments. Each one of us publicly shared something that we would deny ourselves in the coming week, and next Monday we will report on what we learned from the experience. When one senior was having trouble deciding how to practice self-denial, I threw out an idea. This Thursday is a significant day for her, since at 4:00 p.m. that day she will learn whether or not she has received early admission to the Ivy League school of her dreams. When I (half-jokingly) suggested that she could wait until 5:00 p.m. to check her status online, she immediately embraced the idea. She decided that she would instead spend an hour in prayer seeking God's will before she checked her admission status. I was impressed. That really is an act of self-denial for a senior. I can't wait to hear what she learns from this experience - and I also am anxious to know if she got admitted!

toy store

Last week four generations of the Brown family celebrated my grandmother's 90th birthday with great fanfare, but this certainly wasn't the only memorable party we've had in Mutt's honor. When she turned 75 - back in the day when Chaney was her only great-grandchild - we found a way to honor her and help others at the same time. 

Every December the Nashville Baptist Association operates a toy store at Shelby Avenue Baptist Church for needy families who live in the 37206 zip code, and Baptist churches across the city collect toys for several weeks in advance of this event to stock the shelves. In conjunction with this effort, we decided that instead of buying gifts for my grandmother that she didn't really need, we would instead purchase gifts for people who really were in need. Family members were instructed to purchase toys for Mutt that reminded them of her, and they had to be prepared to share an explanation for why they chose a particular toy at the party as Mutt unwrapped the gift. 

The party was a huge success, and Mutt thoroughly enjoyed unwrapping the toys and listening to our stories. A few days after the party, 3-year-old Chaney helped me haul all the toys into the church and place them in the collection box. This was a great life-lesson for Chaney and proved to be highly appropriate way for my family to honor a woman who is constantly on the lookout for opportunities to help those who are in need.

the mirth of Mutt

Last Saturday night, four generations of the Brown family gathered at the Pie in the Sky restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee, to celebrate my grandmother's 90th birthday. Actually, this was a triple birthday party, since both my Dad and my niece, Olivia, also had birthdays the week of Thanksgiving. We were all disappointed that my Mom couldn't be with us, since she was hospitalized for five nights during the Thanksgiving holidays, but we took lots of pictures for her.

In advance of Mutt's birthday - we call my grandmother Mutt because my Dad couldn't say Mother when he was a toddler, and that's what he called her - I had contacted dozens of family members and friends and asked them to send me humorous stories about Mutt. My grandmother is a consummate storyteller - a true raconteur - so it was only fitting that we honor this milestone birthday with stories. The resulting collection, which I titled "The Mirth of Mutt," reveals just how resourceful, generous, thoughtful, funny, and unflappable my grandmother is. Many of the stories reference incidents that occurred during the three decades that she ran the Hospital Flower Shop. 

Here's one of the classic tales that was submitted by one of her friends: "Hattie Lou told me to go to Fred's Dollar Store and pick up a plastic pink princess telephone. I stood there with my mouth open and finally asked, 'Why? She replied that the family of lady who had died wanted a pale pink ribbon on a funeral spray that said, 'Jesus called and sister answered,' and she wanted a pink telephone to place in the center of the spray."

Outliers

After Chaney and I saw Steven Colbert's inteview with Malcolm Gladwell on November 17 and then we each heard Gladwell interviewed elsewhere in subsequent days, we decided we ought to read his new book - Outliers: The Story of Success. An "outlier" is something that lies outside of normal experience - something that falls outside of the statistical norms. In this fascinating book, Gladwell argues that extremely successful people owe their success to much more than personal intelligence and ambition. In fact, people who seem to have maximized their individual potential owe far more to their families, their birthplaces, and even their birthdates. 

Gladwell had me hooked with his introduction about the Roseto mystery. In the 1950s, a physician named Stewart Wolf launched an investigation into why the people of Roseto, Pennsylvania, had astonishingly low rates of heart disease compared to the general American population. As Wolf explored why these Italian immigrants were largely immune to a disease that was at epidemic proportions nationally, he discovered that the secret to their health wasn't diet, exercise, genes, or location. Instead, the key was the sense of community that the Rosetans had imported to America from their ancestral home in the Italian province of Foggia. In Pennsylvania, three generations of Rosetans lived under one roof and shared meals together. Neighbors lingered on porches to chat, and passersby greeted each other warmly on the streets of Roseta. Individual health reflected the overall health of the community.

As I read Gladwell's account of the Rosetans, I thought about the sense of community that existed in the days of the Early Church, when Christ-followers gathered regularly for meals, fellowship, worship, and prayer. I also thought about how the Apostle Paul's emphasized the importance of the interdependence of believers. Individual spiritual health is indeed directly related to corporate spiritual health. This would come as no surprise to the Rosetans. 

"Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it" (1 Corinthians 12:27).