chestnuts roasting...

under the oven's warm glow...
i don't know as i've ever seen chestnuts before, but tonight, there they were, right in the publix produce section, calling out to us, "buy me, try me!" so we did! no open fire here (except the yummy mango candle on my desk...) so we discovered online that, indeed, you can roast these "little" babies right in the oven! you have to cut an "x" in the skin to allow steam to escape. they have the yummiest texture and taste - completely new to us - they're kind of sweet and almost potato-like! odd, but delicious, once you get used to them. they're yummy warm from the oven, and sprinkled with salt. how have we lived all these years without tasting this icon of Christmas lore? and with this, our celebration will shortly come to a close.
inspired by the beautiful katelyn's wedding yesterday, we also had to have these for our new year's eve family night... and even as we giggled, listening to a Christian comic and playing our fun new video game, i ached for a quieter solace. our country shrinks further from the high and lofty ideals of her founding fathers. we as believers have followed like children after the piper as leaders have asserted their God-forsaken opinions and removed individual rights, even as brothers and sisters die to honor those rights worldwide.
am i the only one who felt a melancholy mist over the night? we turned on the obligatory "ball drop" at the last few moments of the old year, and as we dodged disney icons and american idols, i had a sense of the "meaninglessness of it all," as a prophet once said. not IT all, as in the great universe our Papa reigns over, but "it..." all the odds and ends that we allow to occupy our every waking minute. "simplify," my mom-in-law declared as her theme for this Christmas. i hear the call. our world spirals ever further from the heart-whisper of the One who created her... and yet He does call. oh, let this be a year of arching my whole being desperately toward the Lover of my Soul.
there is an odd harmony playing in the God-song of my life. there is an urgency - a rushing in my soul - a panicky sense of incompleteness, and an opposing knowledge of fulfillment and desperation for quiet and rest. ever more frequently, i sense a need to be both more playful, and more serious. more of a dancer, and more of a field-worker. sillier, and somber-er. more passionate to experience every taste, scent, and touch of the life here in the shadowlands, and more eager to forsake it every bit for real LIFE in the homeland we were created for. it is a new year, and it is a new moment to live, and move, and have my being, in Him who created me.