Skip to main content

Planning

Well, the Christmas cake is made, a nativity play has been written, and that all means it must be getting close to.... Advent!  In fact, closer than you might think; because Christmas Day is a Sunday this year, that means the first Sunday of Advent is the earliest it can be, on the 27th of November.  The church has to fit its four Sundays in, you see, even though the calendars limit themselves to 24 days.  Don't tell the kids, or they'll be wanting an extra five days of chocolates.

The main reason that all interests me this year is because I've decided to write a series of four Advent reflections, one for each Sunday.  So watch out for the first one on here in 10 days!  The theme is Jesus' incarnation, which turned into a set of rather neat prepositions:

Jesus came to earth -
  • to reflect God to us
  • to suffer with us
  • to die for us
  • to be glorified over us
If you or anyone you know would like a pdf copy, to print, email or otherwise distribute, please do get in touch.  I'd love for this to reach a wider audience.  These will be available a week in advance of being posted on the blog.

Also, if anyone remembers the daily Advent reflections from 2013 and would like their very own copy to re-read, this is also now available in pdf format.  Drop me a line at marthawhite656[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll email it to you.

So, sorry it's been quiet around here.  Things have been going on, just behind the scenes!  I'll try and post a few more pretty pictures before we hit the Christmas rush.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...

The Normal Christian Life: Spiritual Formation Book 1

"I have never met a soul who has set out to satisfy the Lord and has not been satisfied himself.  It is impossible."   The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee is the first of my four books for spiritual formation that I'm reading this year.  Watchman Nee was a Chinese Christian who was converted in 1920 and was able to spend many years in preaching and evangelism.  However, after the Communist revolution he was imprisoned, and died in jail 20 years later.  The Normal Christian Life is based on talks he gave in Europe in the 1930's. What are the main themes of this book? Nee starts by saying that it's possible that the normal Christian life has never been lived by anyone except Jesus - which is hardly an encouraging beginning!  He then goes on to outline his view of such a life, using the book of Romans as a guide.   He certainly sets a high bar: for Nee, the normal Christian life is based on a knowledge and experience of death to our old self...