SHORT AND SWEET AS A SONG. Because it is a song. Silent Night.
Here’s the video link: Silent Night.
It has a been day or two since I’ve put together a Christmas video for you. Here’s another. This one’s personal. My daughter, Becca Eck, sang this for a new Christmas album that she and some of her fellow Christian musicians released a couple weeks ago, under the guidance of our local church music-meister, Claas Jambor.
The musicians performed the album at a concert last night (Friday). I taped the music for her, our extended family, and you—my family of strangers. And some of you are like family, for I’ve talked with you more than I have some of my distant and loved relatives.
Enjoy the music, if you can spare three minutes to listen.
I spent all night working on it because I’m in a hurry and I don’t know what I’m doing, so it takes longer.
Life is short. And I’ve got stuff I want to do for my flesh and blood families and my family of strangers at large.
Bible maps just got cheaper
If you go to The Casual English Bible® website, you’ll notice the change. We’re puffing the Bible maps for sale and licensing, and we just made a change in how we sell them so frequent users won’t have to pay as much. (But we hope to sell more to compensate, and to spread the use of Bible maps as a helpful tool.)
If you bought a 2,000 pixel map from us a week ago, it would have cost you $40 to get your hands on it and to license it for use in PowerPoint presentations, sermons, blogs. That’s a really good deal. A colleague of mine who makes illustrations of ancient Bible sites based on archaeology, charges $80 for a 2,000 pixel illustration.
Today, you can get your hands on a 2,000 pixel PDF map licensed for publication for $20. We launched it this week. Fanfare to follow later.
And if you’re a frequent user, like a Bible study leader or a Bible-preaching minister or rabbi or priest, you can buy the Big Package…all 950+ PDF maps we have so far. You can buy them once and forever for $75, with free updates. And you can license them for $6.25/month. That’s $75/year.
That’s my quick update for you.
Oh, one more. We’re looking for a printer or two to turn The Casual English Bible New Testament into a book or two.
For the sadness of the season
I know this is a tough time for many of us—especially older folks. We’ve lost a lot. But we’ve loved a lot, haven’t we?
I’m still angry with God about what I had to do to our dog Buddy, while he looked me in the eyes, pleading for me to help. And the best I could do was to kill him. Even now, some 22 months later, I weep at the thought and wipe my face dry. Truly, I don’t understand how a loving God would leave his children to do something that wrenching. Others have experienced far worse.
Is there redemptive value in death this side of the Crucifixion. At times, I suppose. I’m still waiting to see the redemption in what I did.
Some Christians don’t understand that. Some have criticized me and dropped their subscription. Others may follow.
But if God is who we say he is, can’t he take the heat we’re feeling.
When God talks to angry me
One of the ways I dealt with the anger is to write song lyrics about what God might say to me out loud if he would, which he hasn’t. The song is “I Know You’re Angry.” I’ll give you the first three lines:
I know you’re angry.
I know you feel it’s pain.
I know you think that I’m to blame.
We’ve got to start where we are if we hope to be truthful to ourselves and honest to God.
We live in a world of “narrative” over “truth,” when lies trump and trample honesty into the dirt. Troubled pun intended.
But that’s not my world. I don’t want some make-believe narrative or concocted conspiracy theory to move me toward what I know is evil. My career has been one of chasing the truth. And for me, sometimes the truth is this: I don’t understand why God makes us go through heartbreaking tragedies alone.
I know. The single trail of footprints in the sand aren’t mine. They’re God carrying me. I’ll have to trust that imagery, because I didn’t feel it when I watched the lights go out in Buddy’s eyes. I could have used a hug, a hankie, and a brother.
Two more lines in that first verse of me imagining God talking to angry me
Well, that’s okay. I understand.
It’s okay to feel the way you do.
I feel it, too.
I don’t know what else he could say, if he loves me.
So, this Christmastime, if you’re feeling some of what I’m feeling, how about we just go ahead and feel it. Let it be. If it’s who we are, at least in part, it’s part of the full package. It comes with the rest of us.
But it could be the best part of us someday, I guess. It was for Joseph, sold into slavery by his big brothers. As a slave in Egypt, he was promoted to a job that had him reporting directly to the Pharaoh. He told his brothers, who feared execution,
“You wanted to hurt me. I know that. But you need to know something, too. God wanted to help me and many others as well. He turned the bad thing you did into something good. He used it to save many people, just as he is doing today. So stop being afraid of me. I will personally take care of you and your children” (Genesis 50:20-21, The Casual English Bible®).
Where am I in all of this?
I know that kind of thing could happen on a smaller scale for the likes of me. But that’s not where I am.
Here’s where I am. I’m not sure if this is the chorus or bridge to lyrics I wrote, but in a quiet place inside of me late one night, these are the words I imagine God saying to me .
But where you go
Is where I am.
And where you hide
I’ve always been.
So, take your time
And think it through.
I’ll still be here,
Right here with you.
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