@Wesley

So last night I was reading My Utmost for His Highest and I found two devotionals that have something to do with your last two blogs on imagination and service. I was really looking for ones on service and stumbled onto one about imagination. So, I thought that I would just post them on here since I am not up on the ways of "sharing" a blog. Which we need to do by the way. I hope you like them both. I need to get you this book and send it in your next package along with the artsy black light drawing. This book is absolutely amazing.

Ok first one!
Is Your Imagination of God Starved?
"Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things." Isaiah xl. 26
"The people of God in Isaiah's day had starved their imagination by looking on the face of idols, and Isaiah made them look up at the heavens, that is, he made them begin to use their imagination aright. Nature to a saint is sacramental. If we are children of God, we have a tremendous treasure in Nature. In every wind that blows, in every night and day of the year, in every sign of the sky, in every blossoming and in every withering of the earth, there is a real coming of God to us if we will simply use our starved imagination to realize it.
The test of spiritual concentration is bringing the imagination into captivity. Is your imagination looking on the face of an idol? Is the idol yourself? Your work? Your conception of what a working should be? Your experience of salvation and sanctification? Then your imagination of God is starved, and when you are up against difficulties you have no power, you can only endure in darkness. If your imagination is starved, do not look back to your own experience; it is God Whom you need. Go right out of yourself, away from the face of your idols, away from everything that has been starving your imagination. Rouse yourself, take the gibe that Isaiah gave the people, and deliberately turn your imagination to God.
One of the reasons of stultification in prayer is that there is no imagination, no power of putting ourselves deliberately before God. We have to learn how to be broken bread and poured out wine on the line of intercession more than on the line of personal contact. Imagination is the power God gives a saint to posit himself out of himself into relationships he never was in."

After your questions on why we were created with imaginations this gave me a different view of what they were created for.  I love you tons and heaps. I'll post the other one on service tomorrow.

Birth

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when hearing the word birth? Do you envision a women in pangs of labor or the infant? Spiritual or literal? I pray that the mystery and beauty of birth, both spiritual and literal, will never be lost in the charting, work politics or busyness. It is such an incredible privilege to help bring life into the world. A new life filled with such potential for good or evil.

This morning completed my third night shift in a row. Never before has there been a more humbling experience than starting a job right out of college where people depend on you to take care of them and their little one inside. You think that you are semi knowledgeable but that immediately gets blown out the window into oblivion. I feel like there's this little kid inside of me trying to make everyone believe that I'm "grown up." I am grown up but this reality hasn't hit me yet. Please hit me slowly reality...

Through the overwhelming swamp of charting, contraction and fetal monitoring, medications, etc I trudge, but regardless of the dark metaphor there were unforgettably beautiful moments over the last three nights. I think that my labor and delivery experience in just three days would make an excellent start to a book on the crazy happenings of birth. Of course all within HIPAA rules and regulations.


P.S. I have to learn spanish.

The Secret of the Lord

"The secret of the Lord is with then that fear Him." Psalm xxv.14.

"What is the sign of a friend? That he tells you secret sorrows? No, that he tells you secret joys. Many confide to you their secret sorrows, but the last mark of intimacy is to confide secret joys. Have we ever let God tell us any of His joys, or are we telling God our secrets so continually that we leave no room for Him to talk to us? At the beginning of our Christian life we are full of request to God, then we find that God wants us to get us into relationship with Himself, to get us in touch with His purposes. Are we so wedded to Jesus Christ's idea of prayer 'Thy will be done' that we catch the secrets of God? The things that make God dear to us are not so much His great big blessings as the tiny things, because they show His amazing intimacy with us; He knows every detail of our individual lives.

"...him shall He teach in the way that He shall choose.' At first we want the consciousness of being guided by God, then as we go on we live so much in the consciousness of God that we do not need to ask what His will is, because the thought of choosing any other will never occur to us. If we are saved and sanctified God guides us by our ordinary choices, and if we are going to choose what He does not want, He will check, and we must heed. Whenever there is doubt, stop at once. Never reason it out and say-- 'I wonder why I shouldn't?' God instructs us in what we choose, that is, He guides our common sense, and we no longer hinder His Spirit by continually saying "Now, Lord, what is Thy will?'"

~My Utmost For His Highest, Oswald Chambers

First Post

Yesterday became my first day as a blogger (what a great word), although I didn't actually blog anything. I don't really know why a blog appealed to me or what this blog will be about but I have one now so I will make the best of it.

You may wonder why the name Continual Christmas. In my search for a name for this blog I saw it in the end of a quote by Benjamin Franklin. "A good conscience is a continual christmas." It immediately went in my special quotes folder and part of it found its way to the blog title.

The whole idea of christmas is so grand. Giving, not knowing what will be given in return. One christmas of my life I think it would be fun to give and receive nothing in return. What if life was spent as a continual giving of oneself? How different would life be? A continual christmas...