Christmas

Many times people ask me what I and my family do to celebrate Christmas. I usually answer nothing. And then usually (but not always) they give me such looks of pity I almost feel sad for myself. But wait, I enjoy Christmas. Even though I can count on two fingers the times I've received Christmas gifts, I've never felt sad or deprived. I wonder why we think a Christmas tree, and unneeded and unneccesary gifts have anything to do with celebrating Jesus?

So now that I'm older the struggle is to determine how to celebrate Christmas in a meaningful way. I have no desire to adopt any of the materialstic, secular traditions that I see all around me. But what to do instead?

I was listening to a sermon by Francis Chan a few years ago. His family has a tradition (I think) where they go to Tijuana or someplace like that, volunteer at an orphanage, and give away all their gifts. I love that idea!! I love the idea of serving and demonstrating what it means to give of your time, your energy and yourself. Also 2 years I volunteered with this big toy drive at a local church. I don't believe that you need gifts to be happy, but it is awesome for people to pool their resources to bless those who are needy.

I'm still training for the marathon. It's going pretty slowly. I'm at 8 miles now. But I am so encouraged that along the way I keep finding people who want to go running/walking. These women have been such an encouragement to me. I feel that it allows me to grow in physical and spiritual fitness.

I feel tempted to buy the nike/ipod shoe/pedometer competition. It will never happen but I wish there was a way I could get something like that without buying a nike shoe, and have something that tracked it and made graphs when you sync with your computer. Since that will not happen, I need to buy a stopwatch pretty soon. If you know how I can get some free software to put on my pda that tracks this stuff, this will help a great deal.

Final announcement. You may have noticed I put a thing for google ads up. I have no idea if this will make money. But it don't cost a thing, so I thought I should try.

Ok here's the final thing. Really. I have always wanted to run the marathon for two reasons. First, to practice the discipline of running and push my body to the limits, and second, to raise money to support missionaries working in very difficult countries all over the world. So very, very soon, I hope to put up a blog, and maybe mail out a letter to people to give an opportunity to donate. I'm not sure how it'll work cuz there is no leukemia society or cancer society to make the checks out to. I think I'm just going to collect money using email and paypal to keep it simple.