Here’s this morning’s Christmas offering – another song I recorded while I was gallivanting around on singsnap that one summer: The Christmas Song
Merry Christmas! 🙂
Today’s Christmas Offering
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Monthly Archives: December 2016
It happens.
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“I don’t have any serious shoes.”
Lots of errands with Moz today – doctor’s appointment, supermarket, veterinarian’s. We’re sitting at the doctor’s office and Moz says, “We have a lot of appointments today. See? I wore my serious clothes.”
To which I reply, “Your shoes belie that.”
To which she replies, “I don’t have any serious shoes.”
The Christmas Dog
Christmas Eve, 1988.  I was in a funk. I couldn’t see that I was making much progress in my life. My teaching career seemed to be frozen, and I was beginning to think my husband and I would never own our own home or have children. The world seemed a very bleak and unhappy place to me. No matter how many batches of fudge I whipped up or how many times I heard Bing Crosby sing “White Christmas,” I couldn’t seem to find the Christmas spirit…
Source: The Christmas Dog
Two Weeks Afore Christmas!
T’was two weeks afore Christmas and all through Eff Bee not a creature was stirring not a she, he, or me We were prostrate and spent from the holiday bustle not a twitch could be seen from the teen…
Source: Two Weeks Afore Christmas!
“I Will” – Singing in the Car with Alison Krauss
I just had a wonderful drive with Alison Krauss. Well, okay, Alison Krauss wasn’t actually in the car with me. But her voice was. And it was lovely. I was driving home, after a visit with my parent…
Shameless Merchandising (because, you know, it’s Christmas and stuff)
The Good You Seek
I want to take a break, I said.
Can I step out of life for a moment,
or maybe stay in bed?
Can things go on without me?
Can you just pretend I’m not here?
For life is a messy business
and I’m tired and I’m weary
I’ve made too many mistakes to count today
And I’d like to not make anymore, not any.
And the still small voice reached into my thought
– gentle, peaceable benediction –
“All the good you seek and all that you’ve sought
you can claim right now – and that’s no fiction –
for Love is yours to express, to feel, and to be
– you are wealthy beyond description.
Nothing else matters, there’s no other power
no warring opinions, no need to cower
You are loved and you’re loving
and that’s all there is to it
Love’s loving child, and there’s nothing else
but loving, simply nothing.”
– Karen Molenaar Terrell, from
A Poem Lives on My Windowsill <-purchase it here
Teardrop
A tear welled within my eye.
I held my breath and kept very still,
and for that few seconds,
the world was much clearer
through the lens of the tear.
– Xander Terrell, from
Dream Voyage <-purchase it here
Review for Finding the Rainbows: Lessons from Mom and Dad
“I read this book cover to cover with a smile on my face the whole time. The author’s engaging conversational style takes the reader along on her journey to resettle her parents from farm to assisted living and the love, gratitude, and simple joys of life she experiences during the transition. I highly recommend this book and it would make a great gift.”
Review for The Madcap Christian Scientist’s Christmas Book:
“Charming and endearing to read. You sit with a grin on your face while reading.”
Review for Blessings: Adventures of a Madcap Christian Scientist:
“Karen has touched my soul with her heartwarming and hilarious rendition of the road less traveled. Everyone I know has had to listen to me go on and on about how great a read this is! Whether you want to laugh, cry, or just smile about life again, read this!!!”
Review for The Madcap Christian Scientist’s Middle Book:
“I think Karen has reached into my heart,and planted the seeds of love. This book gives inspiration and hope to all that read with open hearts and love.”
Review for The Madcap Christian Scientist: All Things New:
“How inspirational, fun, and enlightening! As with the author’s two other Madcap Christian Scientists’ books, I thoroughly enjoyed this one for its honesty, spirit of adventure and enlightenment. It uplifted me without being preachy. The author graciously gives us a peek inside her life and mind and reader beware!!! She dares go there and everywhere! A great, fun read that I will recommend to others as I have with her other two. My only complaint was I truly wished she had written more and that’s just me being greedy!!”
Karen’s author page.
Xander’s author page
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Not Giving Up
So there’s this site called singsnap that’s a karaoke site – let’s you record yourself singing songs to the site’s backup music. My friend, Kathi, introduced me to this site back in 2013, and I made some recordings on there over that summer and then pretty much forgot about it and moved on to other diversions. 🙂 But this morning I was thinking about a Jason Mraz song, I won’t Give Up, and went back to my recording of it on singsnap. It was the first song I recorded on there and I didn’t really know what I was doing – this is not a professional recording or anything. But I feel impelled to share it today. It’s a song for my country and my world. Here’s the link to it: Karen’s recording of I Won’t Give Up.Â
I won’t give up on us
Even if the skies get rough
I’m giving you all my love
I’m still looking up, I’m still looking up.
– Jason Mraz
“Privatization”
When you hear the word “privatize” what that means is that politicians want to give their corporate buddies permission to use your tax money for stock market speculation and for their own personal profit. We are the only industrialized nation that relies on for-profit health insurance. We have privatized, for-profit, prisons – which… just think about THAT for a minute. The Pres-Elect has chosen as his nominee for Health and Human Services a man who wants to privatize social security. And the Pres-elect wants a woman as Sec of Education who has never attended public school herself, whose children never attended public school, who’s never been a teacher or principal, and whose main goal in regards to education has been to “privatize” it.
Ahem. I have some concerns.
Alrighty. Carry on then…
“Graciously Preparing Me”
“God had been graciously preparing me during many years…”
– Mary Baker Eddy
In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes that “God had been graciously  preparing” her for many years for her discovery of spiritual healing. How did God “graciously prepare” Mary Baker Eddy? Well, let’s see… she lost a beloved brother at a young age; she was widowed shortly after she married her first husband; she was separated from her only son when he was just four years-old, and he was taken across the continent and raised by others; she was challenged with chronic health problems; and endured a failed marriage… for starters.
I’m grateful to say that nine years ago God “graciously prepared” me, too, for future challenges that I couldn’t foresee at the time. Nine years ago I began my journey through a massive depression. At the time I was going through the depression I didn’t see an end to it – I feared I would spend the rest of my life in mental agony. I felt hopeless, helpless, guilty, and fearful. I contemplated ending my life, lost my appetite, and felt like I’d lost myself, too. My struggles turned me to God, Love, in a way I’d never before turned to God. I clung to Love like a drowning man clings to a board on a stormy sea. In time, I learned not to battle the waves, but to surf on top of them. I learned that if I could love I had a reason to live. I learned I could be happy even when I was sad. I learned to focus on now and move from moment-to-moment, step-by-step. And when, in a year, I came out the other side into the light, I recognized my own strength, and the tender love God has for me, and for all Her creation. I came out of the depression with a fearlessness that I hadn’t had going into it. I felt reborn.
The other day I realized that I needed that experience in my life – it helped prepared me for the challenges my world is facing right now. At the time it seemed like the worst thing I’d ever experienced. Now, looking back, I realize it was a wonderful blessing.
 Lord, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt prepare their heart…
– Psalms 10: 17
(Click here to behold a way cool rendition of Godspell’s Prepare Ye the Way that I found on youtube. This’ll get you in the Christmas spirit. 🙂 )
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 