CHRISTMAS APPLES

Dear Blog-Friends,

Before this Christmasy post, I just wanted to give you a little update.  BROKEN JAR is in the process of being republished at this time and should be ready for distribution within a few weeks.  It was important for me to do this because I have been unhappy with the many errors I overlooked in its first printing.  Also, it will soon be available on e-books for your Kindle and the like.

Also, I am finally publishing OUT OF THE CHUTE IN AZALEA HEIGHTS!  This is my little novella based on my year as a fifth-grade hoodlum in Center, Texas, back in 1961. Some of you have been waiting a long time for me to take this step.  I am to be the local author guest speaker at a luncheon in February for the Belton Friends of the Library, so I was prompted to quit dragging my feet, get out of the miry clay, and on the stick about this thing. Also, I have a tentative invitation from Martha Rushing to come speak again to the Reading Club in Center on March 15.  I am quite excited about these opportunities.  OUT OF THE CHUTE... will also be available on e-books from Amazon. I hope that those of you who have been encouraging me for so long will not be disappointed with the result.

Merry Christmas to all of you who keep checking to see if this inconsistent, fickle blogger-of-sorts has finally posted something.  She appreciates you greatly!  

Now, for something a little more inspiring...

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“Then they opened their treasures and presented Him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh.”  Matthew 2:11

                I’ve always thought the greatest gift is words. You can quit eating macaroni and cheese four times a week in order to save for an extravagant something for everyone on your list.  I really do believe in extravagant giving, but I know that the things bought with the big dollar often fail to afford the desired heart-result without first having established what we’re trying to say in giving them.

                Proverbs 25:11 says, “A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.”  If words are the deepest, most definitive messengers, this Proverb provokes some pretty deep thought:  Someone might argue that if words are so foundational, why do writers strive for the perfect metaphor to turn the abstract into the concrete, the words into pictures?  Why do they take a bland statement of fact and embellish it with imagery until it, like a caterpillar to a butterfly, is transformed into a poetic work of art?  Good points, but finish the thought.  When a student of the poem discovers the pictures, the teacher then asks him to communicate his discoveries in words.  When the beloved reads the sonnet, her mind takes the pictures and translates them back into words of her own:  “How thrilling that he loves me this much!”— which was the author’s truest and most basic motivation for writing the sonnet.  He has succeeded in communicating the feelings in his heart via word pictures to his beloved.  He didn’t really want to give her the ocean’s constancy or the rose’s fragrance; they were just the means to an end, a way to communicate the eternal and delightful aspects of his love so that she could get it and say, “How thrilling that he loves me this much!”

                The goods we find inside the festively decorated boxes at Christmas were carefully chosen and paid for at the behest of some sentiment inside the buyer’s heart that took her through the stores searching, finding, touching, inspecting, cocking her head in a visionary way to find out if it would send the right message. What we pull out of the packages and stockings at Christmas are no more and no less than tangible messages, reminders when seen, touched, smelled, worn, driven, or eaten, of someone’s love, esteem, or appreciation for us.  This is why we say, usually a little too casually and more, I fear, as a cliché than a conviction, “It’s the thought that counts.”

                So, okay, even more basic than the words are the thoughts, the feelings.  Yes, they are the real bottom line, but since none of us can read minds, God gave us a means of communicating them to others: words—“words aptly spoken.”

From Broken Jar:365 Days on the Potter's Wheel, Jan Doke