Another Year (poem)

Psalms 116:8 “For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.”

Another Year…

Another year has passed us by

We’re told to laugh and never cry

Sometimes our eyes don’t know why

A tear rolls down our cheek.

Another year has come and gone

Often struggle to face the dawn

Too many days I just hold on

A tear leaks from my eye.

Another year with all I’ve lost

My family torn it’s what it cost

Memories of the miles I crossed

The tears they never stop.

Another year with Christmas day

Without you here the price I pay

Our lives enhanced is what I say

The tears begin to stop.

Another year in which I fight

To know if what I did was right

And when I see the star filled night

The tears all wash away.

A note from the author:

For forty years I've written my mother and father birthday and holiday cards. This is one to my mother this Christmas. After my dad passed away last year, the tears flow more easily but I am healing, my mother, not so much, she's lost the love of her life and no words, (not even my poems) can take the pain away. 

Think of people who are alone this Christmas without their lifelong spouses, or lost children. 

Christmas is NOT a MERRY time for ALL. 

God Bless one and all!

The Season of JOY!

Pss. 51:8 “Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.”

“If you have music inside you, you have God in you.” ~ Joni 

Define what brings you joy.

As I’m winding down my goal setting of 203 blog posts this year, I’m leading you to music, joy, and happiness all found with the LOVE of the Lord. I know this might sound radical but it is my life and the way I live on a daily basis until something negative smacks me upside the head. As you know, this year has been one of them kind of years.

I pushed through with post after positive post never relegating myself to the negativity out there taking over the world. I can only say, there is only one source to that JOY and happiness on a daily basis and that is finding the love of God in the depth of your soul and find music to be a natural healer on days that don’t measure up for you.

If you’ve read yesterday’s blog, you’ll read how music has a way of healing and I posted links to show proof that music is used in many healing capacities. I know that God is the ultimate healer and since we can’t see Spirit or soul we can only FEEL Him to get to KNOW Him, music is His way of intimately touching us through the rhythmic vibrations.

If you say that sad songs make you cry, they make you reminisce, that is all part of God’s plan to make you feel and sense the world around you and Him IN you. God does not ask us not to cry. He doesn’t order us to be stoic and never show emotion, no, tears are a perfect form of allowing God to stream down your face.

Grief is another form of God showing us that emotions are okay to express. When you hear a song, or think about a loved one you lost (often when a song is played) God is planting a seed of remembrance in your heart that has you directly touching Him. 

Joy and Love are other avenues of expressing God from within your soul. I’d like to do a musical experiment of sorts if you don’t mind. You’ll feel something with each link and I’d love to hear your feedback, if not, take to heart what you experience in the sincerest form and allow them to help you grow wherever you may need.

Click this link: bad vibrations?

Good vibrations? 

Intimacy with God - 

I can almost 100% guarantee you didn’t make it through the bad song, your heart stirred at the good vibration one, but your soul QUIVERED at the seconds or minutes you spent in the intimacy with God link. THAT my friends is the musical Healer in Action!

My mission this year was to bring about a change of heart in each and every one of you through every blog post. Whether my words solidified what you already believed or my words touched you in any way or maybe it was the brief light that you allowed in your door and it helped awaken you to a truth you’ve never known.

I’ll admit first hand that I had no intention or plans of going this far this year with my blog post, but as many of you can see with your own eyes, God had different plans, as always. Now my plans, after the 203rd post is to take a little break if God allows. Maybe I’ve given you all that He needed me to and will see that I’ve exerted myself to the extent that it is time for a refresher. 

The Advent season will come upon me and I’ll be on a quiet sabbatical of sorts as I pray and meditate on the season in my own way. Remember, Advent is not for Catholics only. I have my prayerful meditative month before the celebration of Christmas day as man sees it and it turns into what God wants from ME not what I want from Him or from man. 

Writing has been my lifelong journey since before I ever had the internet, a place to voice the words God places on my heart to convey to you, a people in need of an inspirational message. While families gather for Thanksgiving around their table with loved ones or alone, please know God is always in your heart to warm you this season.  

Pss. 51:12 “Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.”

As aromas carry through the house of turkey and pumpkin pies as we give thanks, it will ring in the season of scents with pinecones and cookies. Always remember the reason for the season. Not the manmade appointed season, the real season of the Birth of Christ we read about in our Holy Bibles. Let Jesus’ birth carry you into a New Year, a new beginning a new perspective on life and the Spirit that will follow you long after you’ve left this physical world behind.

In God’s Holy name I pray that you have a Blessed Thanksgiving and a JOYOUS Christmas. Much of my time will be spent here praising the One and only keeper of my soul. 

God Bless you all.

Pss. 66:1 “Make a joyful noise unto God, all ye lands:”

Merry Christmas

“And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, 

stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

― Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Do you remember the days when Christmas or saying Merry Christmas wasn’t questioned? No one ever thought of it as a religious holiday or even turned a side-glance in voicing the theory that Christmas was just a way to shove religion down other people’s throats.

Christmas was always celebrated as a season of giving, with lights and bows adorning houses, gleeful exchanges of Merry Christmas to one another, and toys, we can’t forget about the toys. 

It was a time of the year that families got together, exchanged gifts, ate good food and reminisced about earlier days of Christmas joys that were shared by one and all. It was a time where people gathered around the tree and maybe sung some carols; looked at the beautiful lights on many houses and maybe even drove around the neighborhood to look at the other people and their houses to see how they decorated and celebrated Christmas.

I remember days when Christmas was anticipated not dreaded. My dad always made us wait to put up the Christmas tree until Christmas Eve, in later years maybe two weeks before Christmas and we always took it down after January 7th, after Little Christmas.

We excitedly waited for Christmas knowing there would be toys involved, we’d see family that we never saw much during the year and there would certainly be a lot of laughter and joy during the season. 

The season of giving has turned into the season of greed, materialism, selfishness, and ignorance and let’s not forget the political correctness of it all. Don’t you dare say Merry Christmas because it might offend someone!

Who does Christmas offend? Does it offend the Jewish? No. I’ve heard many say that Christmas doesn’t offend them; they have their Hanukkah/Yom Kippur. Furthermore, they don’t believe Jesus was the Son of God anyway so no, they’re not offended. Are the Muslims offended? They don’t believe Jesus was the Son of God either, so no, I don’t think they’re offended.

Exactly who DOES Christmas offend and why are we being forced to use politically correct terms? I got it, it offends those who think that God should be taken out of our government and Nation. But doesn’t our nation stand by “In GOD we trust.” 

It helps if you understand what the Christmas celebration is all about, celebrated by billions around the world. It isn’t just an American holiday celebrated by the Christians. It is celebrated by all kinds of people from all walks of life, Christian or not. You as a human being can celebrate it or not. If you’re offended, then DON’T celebrate the season. It is as simple as that. The offended are the non-tradition holders.

The people who are offended are usually the people who have no God, no spirituality in their life and no cares for tradition or for the season. In years past the Christians were not outnumbered but as of recent days, people are of many different cultures/ religions/ denominations and thus offended by the Christian. 

We are not shoving our Christianity down your throat we are just paying homage to the traditions of our country (in this case USA) and therefore we continue in Christmas celebrations. Do you celebrate your birthday every year? Of course you do, it is a yearly tradition. No one is offended by facebook forcing others to know when your birthday is and therefore receiving many well wishes on your birthday.

No one seems offended by other holidays just the ones where Christ is involved. Again, our yearly Christian traditions! No one is forcing you to celebrate them, no one is making you take part in any Christ celebrations, we Christians are celebrating with a million other folk. Just because you’re in the crowd of non-believers, should we change the way we celebrate the millennia of celebratory TRADITIONS?

Should we give Atheists a holiday? Is it a tradition passed down for centuries? No? Then no, they should not just pop up and demand a holiday. You see what I’m saying? We are celebrating TRADITION that has been passed down from generation to generation. We didn’t just come up with this holiday and begin shoving it down your throat. 

Granted the holiday has taken on new shapes, forms and meaning to different people and the Christian doesn’t cry afoul of the stores demeaning their holy day for material prosperity.

We sit back and watch as stores demoralize the tradition of Christmas. The merchandiser starts right after Halloween, they make people work on Thanksgiving and even they have ruined their Black Friday event that pushes people (literally) into the materialization of Christmas. This is not what the Christmas Holiday is all about and as you sit offended by people saying Merry Christmas, I as a Christian sit offended by the destruction of a Holy Day, a day that *I* celebrate as a holy tradition. 

Christmas to me now is just another day to gather with some family. It no longer holds the traditional lore that I grew up knowing. Technically, it isn’t even Jesus’ birthday; it’s just a tradition holder. And so I go on celebrating Christmas... in a spiritual manner. 

Luke 2: 8-14 “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

photo by Elaine DeBaucher