Monday, December 24, 2012

A Planting of the Lord.....

I love sunflowers, especially the ones I used to buy at a local grocery store in Washington. They had brown centers which were big and then smaller yellow petals. I'm not a rose lover (there may be some of you gasping right now, who doesn't love roses?...) but after having my arms sliced during a thorn to pruning shear battle with a climbing rose, I am done. Anyway, the sunflower is a happy flower, like daisies. It's face strains towards the sunlight. And when their time is over, they bow their heads and look humble as if they have given their best and understand that their time is fading. But the resurrection side is they give TONS of seeds, don't they? And their glory continues...
These happy flowers represent each and every child that we have here. As I have thought and meditated on this little school, the word 'flourish' or 'florecer' in spanish has become my word for the next coming year. My desire is that these children flourish. That this is a happy place for them and they will know that they are loved. Well, as I have pondered and pondered, one day as I was inside the school taking a looksy at what had been accomplished that day by our workers, I came across this:
growing right smack dab in the middle of the computer lab! Not another one in sight. Here is a sign of things to come. I trust that they will flourish inside these walls (and outside too). And so I trust that they will learn to gaze upward to the One who can cause them to grow and have strong roots in Him.
And this will be the end result.....ahhh......

A VERY JOYFUL ADVENT

A Christmas Thought

There is a child in each of us waiting to be born again. It is to those looking for life that the figure of the Christ, a child, beckons. Christmas is not for children. It is for those who refuse to give up and grow old, for those to whom life comes newly and with purpose each and every day, for those who can let yesterday go so that life can be full of new possibility always, for those who are agitated with newness whatever their age. Life is for the living, for those in whom Christmas is a feast without finish, a celebration of the constancy of change, a call to begin once more the journey to human joy and holy meaning.
Let the soldiers stomp through life. Let the cold winds blow. Let the birth points of all our lives be drowned in obscurity. Let the days seem mundane and fruitless. The crib in Bethlehem justifies them all. Jesus has been here before us. Bring on the days of our lives. We have a God who has already walked them and found them holy making.

–from In Search of Belief by Joan Chittister (Liguori)