Four Months!

Phoebe girl! You are four months old!  How blessed we are.  It is a delight to see your personality emerge. Right now your favorite thing in the world is faces, especially those of your big sisters. You light up when you see them and you babble and laugh. You are ticklish and very social. If we leave you alone for very long the chin trembles and the lip turns down. You love being with us!  At this point you're still not interested in too much sleeping, especially napping.  But you are so cheerful in the morning when you do get some good sleep.  You are working on a tooth and drooling, pulling at everything you can reach, especially a cat walking by! Phoebe Hope we love you.

November Thoughts

November is here and with it our first snow flurries. We move inward and settle in with tea and warmth, candlelight and piles of books, quilts and snuggles.  Our last few weeks have felt heavy and somehow the shift in season seems fitting.  How thankful we are for sweet baby smiles and big sisters dressed up, visits from friends and for the light of Christ in the dark world.  

These words by Sarah Clarkson seem ever so appropriate:

If I could choose a season to embody my soul, I would ever choose autumn. Each year, when the calendar and the wind shift toward chill and fire and shadow, I feel a kind of spiritual homecoming. I watch the turning trees, the fire in leaf, the sharp, cold air, and I feel I am watching a paradox that images my own pilgrim journey in this world. There, in the vivid colours the earth casts as laugher in the face of death, I glimpse that mystery Paul describes in us whose hearts are already radiant with eternity, but whose bodies are moored in time. In autumn, I understand his enigmatic description of the way we are ‘dying, yet we live’. .
I want to live with an autumn hued intensity. There is such passion in this season, it has a vim akin to that of youth when the world is still filled with ideals. The joy of it throbs through the earth, running gold through the veins of the leaves, crimsons the trees. Life is a gift, a revelation, a joy. And I believe that I am called to live with a passion as fiery as those leaves, as playful as that wind because I partake in the eternal youth of my Redeemer. I too must glow in the face of death with a vim and joy that sets feasts and laughter, friendship and song as my last word to the darkness.
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But I also want to live with an autumn shaped acceptance. For the leaves silver with age and decay. The fields grow sere. Death still reigns in the broken world, and the earth yields to winter with a quiet grace. So too, I know that there is a real sense in which all that I love here is transient and passing. We live amidst chill and difficulty. We are aware, like those brave leaves, that the husks of our bodies will wear out, that change and finitude are our lot. .
But there is a peace in autumn to equal the passion because the earth knows that winter will never have the final word. In the brown fields, the slim, bare-branched trees, the huddled bushes, springtime sleeps. They rest, because they know that the sap will one day rise again. As will the sap of Love in me. So, I like this season, can embody that gracious, fearless tension of death and change met with a crimson song of hope. Of quiet joy. This is my autumn life.