christmas shopping

With only 45 days to go before Christmas, here are a few ideas for your Christmas shopping.

Gingerbread trees
Why not give your friends or relatives a Christmassy treat? I'll be making and selling these gingerbread star Christmas trees over the next few weeks.


Prices are £10 for a large tree (17 biscuits) and £8 for a small tree (11 biscuits) and all the money will go to Youthscape's Bute Mills campaign.

The trees are made from stacked gingerbread stars, all home made and held together with icing. They can be decorated with chocolate stars, edible glitter, hundreds and thousands or chocolate beans - your choice. Dairy-free versions available. I haven't tried making gluten free but I'm willing to give it a go if you want one. The trees come on a plate and wrapped in cellophane, ideal to give as a gift.

Delivery/collection free in/near Luton.
Please ask if you want one delivered elsewhere. I'm sure we can work something out.

Oh, and if you want one but you disagree with my prices, make me an offer. It's all for a good cause!





Glass Art / Jewellery / Decorations
My sister in law makes amazing glass art pieces, jewellery, decorations, plates, coasters and clocks, as well as brilliant paintings, all of which make beautiful gifts. The kiln is on and ready to create so get your orders in now at www.em-art.co.uk.

Em-Art donates 20% of all their profits to Krasif Aid, who work in Bulgaria.

Toasty Warm Slippers 
If biscuits and glassware don't tick all your festive shopping list items, slippers are always a great failsafe Christmas gift. Marmiñas is a new company producing 100% sheepskin slippers in sunny Buenos Aires. Keeping feet warm is a fab thing, but the Marmiñas crew decided they wanted to do more, so all their slipper products have a linked charity. If you buy their Slippers Against Food Poverty, they'll donate to MakeLunch the equivalent of 5 meals for a hungry child for every pair sold.


Oh and...
It's worth pointing out that nobody asked me to write this blog, and I won't benefit at all from it. But if you do the shopping, the charities will, and that's what it's all about.

enjoying advent

It's Advent! For seven more days. A whole week of it left.

As a child, Advent was two things to me
- a countdown to Christmas, with a calendar to help. I don't ever remember having a chocolate one, but my brother and I were always excited to see what picture was net.
and
- that time of year when you were actually allowed to handle matches in church.

This year I'm really appreciating Advent as a season of preparation, a time to acknowledge the significance of what we're about to celebrate and to reflect on some of the themes. And I've found a few things online that have been helpful with that too so I thought I'd share.

Advent Unwrapped - a series of creative reflections from Seeds, curated by a different team each week. So far there's been a group-authored poem curated by Chris Norris in week 1, a story and two images from Jo & Neil Ruckman, and a thought and shared poem from Heather Ellis. I expect there's more to come...

Question Time for Advent by Penelope Swithinbank. An Advent Sermon from Penelope in which she suggests three questions to ponder, one per week for Advent. You can read it at her blog or listen to it if you'd prefer. I was late to this party so haven't managed a question per week, but I did find this talk profoundly challenging as well as a time of great closeness with God. I plan to reflect on the questions anyway, even though it won't be a week-by-week Advent thing.

A Pause In Advent - a small group of linked blogs who post every Sunday/Monday (or thereabouts) during advent with a short reflection on a theme of their choice. I'm enjoying taking a few moments each week to consider a theme but I'm also really loving reading the other posts. There's a list in the left-hand sidebar of the blog that's linked from the image here.

That's all for now - I'll come back and add to this post if I come across anything else.

a pause for advent - waiting

Once again, this year during advent I'm learning that I'm really not very good at waiting. Whatever it might be that I'm waiting for, I get impatient so quickly - a holiday, a train, a special occasion, a deadline, a change... it seems none of it can come soon enough. It's why this blog has the name it does - an encouragement from a friend to focus on what is happening right now, rather than to always be looking to what is next.

I'm always tempted to ice cakes before they're fully cooled, or to move onto step three of a craft project before the glue from step two is fully dried. I've never done any house decorating - probably a good thing! When I took up the bassoon aged fourteen, the first two lessons were just before the summer holidays. My teacher went through a few basics with me and pointed out the next two or three pages of the tune-a-day book for me to have a look at over the six week break. By September I'd finished the book and played a whole load of other things too. Too impatient to spend six weeks on three pages!

To some extent, this is my personality type. I'm always going to be like this, and I'm aware that I constantly need to learn how to recognise which things need the time and the wait and how to develop the discipline I need for those situations. Sometimes that lesson is learnt by retrospectively recognising what I have missed by not waiting. I wonder how much better my bassoon technique might be if I had spent six weeks on the first three lessons?

Fourteen years ago I travelled to Thailand to spend two weeks in a camp in the northern jungles. One of many camps occupied by Burmese refugees, fleeing the military dictatorship that had controlled the country since the assassination of Aung San in 1947. For two weeks, we spent time with some students our own age as they taught us a little bit about Burmese history, shared their culture, explained some of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and told us their stories. Personal, horrific stories of escaping from a military regime - things we could barely imagine in our own lives, stories that seemed to fit better in film scripts than in real life.

It was a powerful trip. Life-changing for us teenagers in so many ways. I have no idea where any of those Burmese students are now, and not really any way of finding out, but in them I met a group of people who were filled with joy in the face of great adversity. Many of them had been brutally tortured, had seen family members murdered or entire villages torched. And yet they smiled, real genuine smiles every day. They trusted God and they were grateful for what he had given them.

We returned home changed but also aware of a fifty year old humanitarian situation happening on the other side of the world that the media were largely ignoring. We hoped for peace, for breakthrough, for change. But it seemed so big and so impossible.

In the last two years, cracks have begun to appear in that giant, dark, impossible situation. The release of Aung San Suu Kyi after twenty one years of house arrest. The first stages of democratic reform. The country opening up to visits from international heads of state, and even international media.

Change is coming. Changes that I had dared to hope for when listening to my Burmese friends relay their stories, but never fully believed I'd see happen in my lifetime. I can't begin to imagine what that might be like for the people we met in those camps. Tiny steps, but early glimpses of a new Burma with the freedom for my refugee friends to return home.

It's an encouragement. A reminder that sometimes hope takes a long time, but it's worth the wait. We're impatient, as humans but it's not hope that dies, it's our interest. I'm not pretending this is easy - sometimes it's just too painful to keep hoping. I wonder how that was for Anna and Simeon, both of whom had waited their entire lifetime to see the infant Christ. The hope that he would come, not realised for many years. Were they ever tempted to give up the waiting? And how did it feel on that day to hold him in their arms?

I know I'm rubbish at waiting, but this advent I'm hoping to be just a little better at it. And to focus on God in the waiting, as we wait for him.

While I've been typing this, news has come through from some friends in Florida that a new liver has been found for their 7-month old son. A season of waiting come to an end, leading them straight into another wait, while their boy is in surgery for 15 hours. Will you join me in praying for them today?

** UPDATE **
From our friends in Florida...
"Praise our God of miracles! Charlie is out of surgery and all went well. The incredible surgeons were at work for almost 12 hours and told us his liver was like a rock, bleeding and with no function left. This new liver came just in time. Thank you for your prayers, thoughts and comments. It will be a slow and difficult recovery but God will sustain us as He always graciously does. Bless Charlie our little miracle!"

a pause for advent - joy to the world

I haven't got much to say for this week's advent pause. I'd simply like to share a story with you of what happened yesterday.

Last year one of our friends put together a small group of singers to sing carols at a charity event. Seeing as we were rehearsing, we arranged to sing in a few wards at the hospital in Luton on the way. The day was a lot of fun and we raised a bit for charity as well as leaving a few smiles on some faces.

So this year, when the event organisers asked again, we agreed. Except instead of the hospital, we sang four times in elderly residential homes.

We finished carol singing in the 1st floor common room of one of the homes and left to find the room on the next floor up. In the corridor we came across some staff wheeling a lady in an armchair out of a room. It was the first time she'd been out of bed for two years but it had taken so long to get her up and settled that she missed our set.

We stopped and sang Joy To The World and Silent Night in the corridor as she smiled and her daughters and four members of staff wept. What a privilege.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing.

a pause for advent - humility

In an attempt to get back into blogging (and thus back into writing about things as an opportunity to stretch my thinking and process my thoughts) I've joined a few linky things. Last Friday I did Lisa-Jo's Five Minute Friday and today I'm participating in a four-week advent pause series hosted by Floss.

So here it is...

This term has seen us join our local Anglican church. It's been great to be able to walk to a church just over 5 minutes away and to worship right in the heart of the community we're living in, getting to know folk who live round about. It's also the most traditional and liturgical Anglican church I've ever been involved with and I'm discovering a new appreciation for liturgy, tradition, ritual and repetition. There's peace, wonder and beauty in it. But that's for another post, another day.

In the liturgical calendar, the start of advent is the start of a new year. I'd never really thought of it like this before, but it makes a lot of sense. Through advent we wait for and prepare for the birth of a baby, a king, of God. A new life that brought new life.

There was one single word that struck me during yesterday's service.

humility

The idea that God. GOD! Bigger than anything that is or can be imagined. More powerful than anything we can see or experience. Beyond, before, above and around all that is, has been and will ever be. God. God in all his vastness made himself humble, coming to earth not as the most powerful of creatures but as a baby. Dependent, small, fragile. That's humility.

God comes to earth and tries to be human.

Humans come to earth and try to be gods.

This week I'm going to be thinking about humility, how I can learn more of it from God and be more humble in life.