Sitting in Cafe Chocolate in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Santa Baby, Chocolate Fountain and a steaming hot Mocha, snow on the ground and small-town Christmas cheer. Life is good. This is the time to cherish, to enjoy that hometownishness that is Lititz, where i spent the first 18 years of my life. To relish and remember every bit of family and old friends and keep it fresh in my memory - the one thing i can take with me to Namibia that i don't have to find a space in my bags for. which reminds me...I BOUGHT LUGGAGE! its so real now i can feel it. Coffee with a dear from from high school last night was priceless - meeting her two little ones and reminiscing, sharing the years of life which we have spent miles from one another, and rekindling a kinship that seems never to have ended. joy is mixed with sadness, knowing that this week at home (the home that will always be referred to as home, even though it's not - it somehow still is) will be the last for quite some time. and the joyful moments sharing time and space with moments that don't hold much joy, like spending yesterday in the hospital with my grandpa. so small, in pain and bewildered, eyes that for the moment they were open, searced my face looking for the tiniest bit he could recognize. i left with a touch of melancholy traced with hope, the kind that is stirred up by seeing a marriage full of endurance, grace and love that is so rarely witnessed in this age and culture of divorce - the American equivalent of polygamy. but the legacy i see in my family is a dear gift. i hope that no matter where you are as you read this, you are enjoying every bit of this time of year, when the air fills with Christmas, and we actually recognize it. So thankful for the birth of my Savior today...and the song that i hear right now reinforces the joy of His world...
"the colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky are also on the faces of people going by. i see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do, they're really saying, 'i love you'..."
so often you hear this song in conjunction with images of destruction and devastation, to somehow forcefeed sarcasm and irony. but now today, as i sit here in hometown, USA, a child of the King Jesus, saved by His gift of grace, i don't think saracasm.
i think to myself, what a wonderful world.
