Christ came

It's been a weird season. Many of our usual Advent and Christmas traditions that we keep have fallen by the wayside for more pressing, urgent matters, and the reality of brokenness in this dark world has never felt so heavy as it does this year. We have seen more Weary World than Happy! and Merry! 

How thankful we are that Christmas doesn't depend upon our ability to make merry. The truth is that we missed more Advent reading nights than we caught. We never took our jammies and hot chocolate Christmas lights ride. We didn't bake bread for our neighbors. The week that Jimmy took off before Christmas that was supposed to be filled with lazy days by the fire were instead spent having hard conversations and wrestling with a situation outside of our desires or control. 

But those hard things didn't ruin Christmas. Instead, they made the whole point of Christmas - Christ's Mass - more clear than ever. The broken weariness of this world made our hearts more grateful than ever before for the little baby who came to heal it all. The baby who left his royal place to enter in to this darkness and bring light. 

Tears are falling, hearts are breaking
How we need to hear from God
You've been promised, we've been waiting

Welcome Holy Child
Welcome Holy Child

Hope that you don't mind our manger
How I wish we would have known
But long-awaited Holy Stranger
 

Make Yourself at home
Please make Yourself at home
 

Bring Your peace into our violence
Bid our hungry souls be filled
Word now breaking Heaven's silence

Welcome to our world
Welcome to our world

Fragile finger sent to heal us
Tender brow prepared for thorn
Tiny heart whose blood will save us
 

Unto us is born
Unto us is born
 

So wrap our injured flesh around You
Breathe our air and walk our sod
Rob our sin and make us holy

Perfect Son of God
Perfect Son of God
Welcome to our world

bowling without tears

The year was 1987. I was ten years old and Ron was eight. Neither of us had ever been bowling, and the day had come for us to experience the Harbor Lanes. I would say that a good time was had by all, but one of us left the bowling alley in tears (and it wasn't me). His sadness wasn't because he bowled a score of nine, but rather because I beat him with my sixteen. 

Bowling must be in the Kyker blood, because these people slayed those pins! And a good time was actually had by all. 


Thanksgiving

Growing up, Jimmy spent most of his Thanksgiving holidays in Kentucky with his dad's family. Those days were filled with cousins, and games, and food, and the laughter (and sometimes arguing) of aunts and uncles, and freezing cold golf games with the men, and whole-family Euchre tournaments in the basement (I know that's where Jimmy decided that basements were the epitome of family coziness). 

Things change and the kids are all grown with families (and in-laws) of their own. Homes have become too small for the masses to gather in, and hostesses have gotten tired of hostessing. The old traditions have evolved into experimental new ones. This year Jimmy got to combine his old joy of being with the Patterson cousins for Thanksgiving with the new joy of his own family and home. With the exception of a men's golf game in the freezing cold, I'm pretty sure we covered all the old bases.