No Sacrifice

Dr. David Livingstone once said "People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa.  Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?. . . Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought!  It is emphatically no sacrifice.  Say rather it is a privilege.  Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger,  now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink, but let this be only for a moment.  All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in, and for, us.  I never made a sacrifice.  Of this we ought not to talk, when we remember the great sacrifice which HE made who left His Father's throne on high to give Himself for us."

I know that the Apostle Paul, in Romans 12, tells us to give ourselves as living sacrifices.  I am fairly certain Dr. Livingstone knew this quite well and was not contesting Paul's wording.  I think he was saying that we see the giving up of trifling things and time we do as such a big thing, when in reality, we certainly give up nothing in comparison to what we have been given.  If I were to rephrase (Dr. Livingstone, please indulge me here) the good missionary's quote for our time and circumstances, specifically my time and circumstance, I would say this:

People can talk of the sacrifice I have made in staying home with my kids, giving my money to the church and to missions when I could buy more things or take fancier vacations, and realizing and verbalizing how great a sinner and how I have nothing without Christ.  Can that be called a sacrifice when God gave me Christ and His Righteousness, the strength and brains to live and work and make money, the world I live in, the children I am blessed to have, the church which trains and exhorts me, the missionaries who spread the Gospel around the world, which gifts I can never repay?  Forget that!  Say rather it is something I have the joy of doing, and who am I (as David said in I Chronicles) that I get to do that?  So I have anxieties over finances or traffic or government; I get sick; I suffer being made fun of or disparaged as being too conservative and small-minded; and I meet danger, though not much of that here except what is common to all in a city like this.  So I forego some things like fancy vacations, new cars, electronic devices, television shows, and the like; so what are they in the grand scheme of things and since all is God's anyway?  So what I give time to serve the church and others?  The time is not mine but God's to use.  And really, what is Time? (In The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, the demon Screwtape instructs the demon Wormwood to "zealously guard in his [the man who was Wormwood's assignment] mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own.' . . . The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him as a pure gift.")  So what if people think I'm strange because honesty compels me to follow tax laws or not take advantage of others financially?  I get depressed, scared, and worried, but hopefully, these are only temporary feelings.  All this is less than peanuts compared with seeing and showing God's love and glory in a darkened world. My dear friend Esther recently said, "So often we think we are doing God a favor, and we forget our insurmountable debt."  This is especially true when I remember what Philippians 2:5-8 says of Christ: "Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather he made himself nothing. . . being made in human likeness. . . he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death--even death on a cross."

Christmas, the time we celebrate Christ's incarnation, is a good time to remember this afresh.  So as we present ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing, let us not think of it as a giving up of anything but of gaining all that is real, unseen, and eternal.

Project: Gingerbread House

     Another project we tried this Christmas was a Gingerbread House.  I can hear someone thinking, "You can buy those kits at the grocery store.  What's the big deal?"  It's not.  Except we made it from scratch.  And it was a group effort.

     My sister likes to bake cookies and cakes and whatnot with my daughter.  So a few weeks ago they made gingerbread cookies.  The recipe they used turned out more dough than they could use at the time, so I took the rest home and stored it for future use.  Project Partners:  my sister and my daughter who made the dough.

     My father likes to collect useful objects (this does not do justice to his "hobby," and what he has collected and how he's collected it would fill a book in itself).  He can make and/or fix just about anything.  (Case in point: my daughter went through a spell where she watched the old movie Bed Knobs and Broomsticks over and over.  She wanted a "bed knob" like that of the movie.  So Daddy went to his basement and produced a spherical wooden bed knob and a can of gold spray paint.)   Recently, a good friend of his went through a divorce and was getting rid of much of the contents of his home.  Daddy, not being able to bear wasting anything that might possibly, remotely, sometime-in-the-future, hopefully be used, brought back a number of items.  In fact, this has now become a by-word at our house.  ("Where did you get it?"  "Daddy brought it back from--."  "Ahhh.  I see," with a knowing nod.)  One of the items was a cast iron gingerbread house mold.  I have no idea where it had been made, but it looked rather unused and is heavy enough to use as a battering ram.  Project Partners: Daddy who gave us the mold and his friend who gave it to him.

      So I proceeded to pull the dough out of the freezer and thaw it for making a house.  I didn't have the first idea how to make the proper icing to hold it together (the box kits have it pre-made), so where did I go?  The Internet of course!  I found, wonder of wonders, a recipe specifically for gingerbread houses, and it worked really well, drying nice and hard.  My daughter and I (well, mostly I) rolled the dough, put it in the mold, and baked it.  It baked up nice and hard, and thus good for construction.  However, if we try to eat it, we'll probably break our teeth.  The pieces were a little lopsided and not as smooth as the box kits, and I had a little trouble getting the walls to stay up. To that end, I affixed one end firmly to inside of a box lined in parchment paper.  I can't draw a straight line with a ruler, so you'll see our windows, and anything else that requires a line, are a bit crooked.  My daughter did the decorating of the house, the gingerbread boys and girls, and the gingerbread trees.  She has a liking for green and red sugar sprinkles so those went everywhere.  Project Partners: my daughter and me (unless you count my two-year old son who ate one of the peppermint-chocolate squares we used for the walkway while watching and trying to grab everything in sight).

     It's not worthy of Better Homes and Gardens, but we had fun doing it.  And I learned a good deal (such as making my pieces as smooth as possible so they stay upright better and that the icing recipe is way to much for one small house-I have at least half left), so I'll be better prepared for next year.

     Writer's Note:  After the drafting of this piece and after the picture was taken, I mistakenly left the box with the house down in reach of my two-year old son.  In my defense, I have basically run out of places that he cannot reach.  This morning he pulled it off, and it fell to the floor.  Though the mess was big (lots of powdered sugar), the house itself stayed intact.  In fact, all that broke was one of the peppermint bark walkway pieces and the icing along the walkway.  That speaks well for the gingerbread and icing construction materials.

Project: Fabric Nativity

     My children and I enjoy working on projects together.  (I use the term "together" loosely.)  This is especially true at Christmas. Recently, my sister and I found some various bits of forgotten projects from our youth; so forgotten, in fact, that none of us, including our mother in whose storage cabinets these were found, remembered they were there. One of these was a Nativity Scene that was to be sewn and stuffed, each character a little pillow in front of a stable backdrop. So I took it home and proceeded to finish it (I wanted something for my kids actually to be able to touch, as opposed to having only ceramic decorations they could easily break).  Now, I am not a seamstress.  You can just ask my best friend whom I helped with a project many years ago.  I sewed some buttons for her.  The buttons stayed on, mind you, but the craftsmanship left a lot to be desired.  (You can see more of her work at the blog "House of Trouble" listed on this page.  She is absolutely amazing.)  However, I can sew a small seam which, again, will usually hold, even it its a bit, shall we say, untidy.  Here is a picture of the Nativity Scene.

     I learned a number of things from this project.

     First, where you can use iron-on adhesive, do it.  It saves the fingers.

     Second, do not trim the shape of your object BEFORE you sew it, even if the directions say to and the pattern has outer lines to cut.  Cut a big circle or square, do the sewing, and then trim it.  Doing this helps you when you turn it right side out; you won't have places in your seam where the edge of the fabric sticks out.

     Third, six-year old children get bored easily.  Okay, so that's nothing new, but it impressed itself on me again.  My daughter helped with the stuffing--only.  However, she was an immense encouragement.  Even when my work looked horrible, she would say it was wonderful and amazing.  How's that for a loving stroke to one's self-esteem?

     Fourth, the last piece I do (if you are anything like me, yours too) is probably going to be the best.  My work improved as I figured out how best to go about it.  The directions were not very helpful.  I suppose to someone who has been doing this for years, the directions were adequate, but for a beginner like myself, they were distinctly lacking in depth and detail.  So I had to figure a lot out by trial and error.  But I learned, and I figure if a day goes by that I don't learn something new, that day has probably been wasted.