Here We Come A Wassailing....

Short Version:

2 years ago, our family walked across the street and Christmas Caroled to our neighbor. One and done.

1 year ago, our good friends, The Corbetts, joined us on vocals and mandolin as we serenaded 7 or 8 homes in the lower part of our neighborhood. We sang a tune or two to each house...many of which were very surprised and blessed by our gift of song.

This year....
14 of us went out to spread some Christmas Cheer to the Michael Lane/Wayne Ave. area of Dudley, MA.

We recently began attending a new church and have quickly become connected with some wonderful families.....families who love The Lord, and love each other...families that want to do right, honor Him, live and learn by His Bible alone, and enjoy time with one another. Tonight pretty much hit all of those points.

It was a great night for caroling....48 degrees...not too cold for folks to hold their doors open to listen to a song or two.
We went out with a pretty basic 3 song setlist:
1. Jingle Bells (we had 4 kids under 5 years old...they had a good time jingling bells and laughing all the way)
2. Hark The Herald Angels Sing: We HAD to add something about Christ in our set. Plus....I always get all rev'd up at the "Join The Triumph Of The Skies" part.
3. We Wish You a Merry Christmas...just a classic wassailing set-ender.

Our first practice was also our first caroling stop...the deck of my parents home....a dress rehearsal, if-you-will.

A little blurred with no flash but....you get the idea.

After that...we hit maybe 12 or 15 houses in our neighborhood. It's kind of funny....When you knock on some one's door unexpectedly in the night and then burst into song on their front lawn....our culture isn't used to that. So, usually, the first song is spent with the homeowners trying to pry family members away from the TV to come and listen and/or keeping their dogs from jumping through the glass storm door and tearing us to shreds. I will say that, by the middle of the second tune...every family we visited was on board and singing along. We even brought one woman to tears. Booya.
here's some random shots of us on the road:






We nominated Timmy Nault as our official caroling photographer...so...while He wasn't in most of our actual caroling shots...we had to pay him his due (complete with his kind-of-creepy, kind-of-cool fur hat):

Trust me...he's cool.

We even had a "Drive-by" caroling occur when a van that was driving down the street stopped to see what was going on...they got jumped with an unexpected "Jingle Bells" before they sped on their way.

Our night ended back at our home with delicious Hot Chocolate, tasty Winter Brews, lots more music, and lots more laughter. Easy....Simple....Perfect.

When I started facilitating drum circles years ago, I read and recited a quote from and African drum instructor, Babatunde Olatunji, who said :
"All people, from all walks of life, all colors, we have things that we can do together, and it's the simplest thing to make music and sing together..."

Add to that Psalm 147:1:
"Praise the Lord. How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise Him".

It was wonderful to bless our neighborhood with song this evening. It was even better to honor the Lord through good, happy, pure times of rejoicing this precious season with friends and family.
I am grateful for my friends, old and new, that I shared this night with. I am more grateful to celebrate the season...and to have honored The Lord...the Creator...who clothed Himself in His own creation...who came to us...and came to love, know, teach, guide, and inspire us.
I would love nothing more than to go back in time, to "join the triumph of the skies" and proclaim our Saviour's arrival with the angelic hosts.

Tonight may be as close as I'll ever get.

I'll take it.

Frozen Pipes and Divine Intervention

So, On Monday nights, our family worship time is usually centered around talking more about what our pastor preached on Sunday. He's been going through the book of Hosea and was talking about "Spiritual Stubbornness". I like to use some sort of object lesson when teaching The Word to my family but this time...I had nothing good. The bit in Deuteronomy about stoning the stubborn son seemed a bit intense for a four year old and an 18 month old. I had thought of 50 ways to illustrate "Stubbornness"...and all of them sucked.
I got home from work and Chrissy told me that the cold water pipe running to the washing machine had froze. It's been colder than cold lately (-7 last night...-1 right now). I had just walked through the door after a super busy day at work....not exactly the project I wanted to tackle at that moment....but, duty calls, ya know?
Gavin was interested in what was going on with the washer. Now, he's a great little helper but, he's still at such a young age that doing a project with him alongside me usually takes about 50% longer than if I were to just do it myself....I was sorta hoping to just fix this thing quickly and then eat some dinner BUT, it's a great opportunity for him to learn and it's good quality time spent with dad so I had him help me out. We pulled the washing machine hose off of the cold water line and ran the water...it flowed out of the pipe no problem. O.k. so, it's not the pipe, it's the hose. We then pulled the other end of the hose off of the washing machine...I tried to blow through it.....nothing. Plugged.
We took the hose upstairs and ran hot water through it....and about 5 minutes later, I blew again, this time blowing a 3 inch cylinder of ice out of the hose and shattering onto the laundry room floor. We wrapped the threads with plumbers tape, reinstalled the hose, and were back in business. As we were putting away our tools....it hit me. Straight from The Lord. Like a ball peen hammer between the eyes:

"There's your "Stubbornness" illustration."

Just like that.

At family worship...we talked about how the hose was plugged...it couldn't do it's job and prevented the washing machine from doing work as well. Only when the hose was cleared could it do the job that it was intended to do..and only then could it provide the means for the washing machine to do the job that IT was designed to do. When it was sitting there all clogged up...it was useless.

We then parallelled that to our own hearts...how we hang onto things that we want...and make decisions based on what WE want to do...not what HE has for us...and we clog ourselves up with selfishness, disobedience....sin...our own agenda. We sit there with our hearts plugged with filth...useless...unable to do the work that we were designed to do. Unable to reach those that we are supposed to be reaching...all because we are clogged with our own selfish desires.
It's when we submit to Him and humbly allow Him to move obstacles out of our way that we begin to be able to be used by Him for His Glory.

Thank you, Lord. What a gift to be able to use this fix-it project as an opportunity to teach my family God's Will for us. I am continually blown away by the places that we see God when we are interested in finding Him. He will literally use ANYTHING to teach us about Him...if we are open to learning.

He's so cool like that.