The Tabernacle in Gingerbread

This is what we've been up to this Christmas season:

Here's the outer courtyard with wash basin, altar of burnt offering, and the Holy Place and Most Holy Place. Lucy did the wash basin, but, sadly, I don't have a good picture of it.A closer look at the Holy Place and Most Holy Place.The Holy Place with table for the showbread, the altar of incense and the lampstand.
The Most Holy Place. Cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant by Edmund.
Altar of Burnt Offering.
These are the recipes we've been using for two generations in our family for gingerbread fun at Christmas. We've never made a Tabernacle before, however. It just so happens that a scale model puts the Holy Place and Most Holy Place together at 30 centimeters, or about the length of a standard ruler. The width and height are 10 centimeters each. The outer courtyard is 100 centimeters by 50 centimeters (that's a little over a yard by half a yard).

Gingerbread for Men or Houses
Bake at 350F for 15 minutes.

1/3 cup shortening
1 cup brown sugar, packed
12 oz. (1 1/2 cups) dark molasses
2/3 cup cold water
7 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda (aka bicarbonate)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix shortening, sugar and molasses thoroughly. Stir in water. Sift remaining ingredients together and stir in. Chill dough. Heat oven to 350F. Roll dough 1/2 to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut shapes. Bake at 350F for 15 minutes, switching racks halfway through baking. When done, no imprint will remain when touched lightly with finger.
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Royal Icing for Gingerbread House Construction

1 pound sifted confectioner's sugar
3 large egg whites
1/2 teaspoon lemon extract (I always use 1 teaspoon lemon juice)
drop of water at a time to reach desired consistency. (When I use the lemon juice I never need the water.)

Beat well, approximately 6 minutes.

Makes enough for one batch of gingerbread houses.

When we make houses, we cut from a pattern using a 3X5 card for a roof and a card cut to 2 1/2 by 5 for sides. From that, you can cut ends that match the height of the sides and form a point where the roof meets. It's fun and easy to do, and they're really cute! :)

Favorite Things?

I was asked today, on two separate occasions, what my favorite holiday is and what my favorite Christmas hymn or poem is. Since I am looking forward these days to November and all the fun it holds for our family (three birthdays and Thanksgiving!), I thought I'd share my answers here. Not that you care much, but.... At any rate, this blog post is helping me procrastinate. Of course, you'd never do that, either.

Favorite holiday: it's a toss-up. Around this time of year, I say Thanksgiving. Around Easter, I say Resurrection Sunday. I love them both, but Resurrection Sunday probably would win in a dead heat, since I gave my heart to my Savior on that day. Besides, Lucy was born around then, too.

Incidentally, I also like to celebrate Purim, the Jewish festival remembering the book of Esther.

No, I'm not Jewish. At least, I wasn't born that way.

Favorite Christmas hymn? Hands down, it's Good Christian Men, Rejoice. That's good stuff.

Finally, my favorite Christmas poem follows below. Now the Holy Days may commence! (Feel free to share your faves, too, in the comments.)

Let the Stable Still Astonish.

by Leslie Leyland Fields

Let the stable still astonish.

Straw–dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain,
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough.

Who would have chosen this?

Who would have said: “Yes,
Let the God of all the heavens and earth
Be born here, in this place?
Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms
Of our hearts

And says, “Yes,

Let the God of Heaven and Earth

Be born here –

In this place.

A Falling Star

My beloved country is dropping from its place of pre-eminence like a meteor. Over the past few months, I have felt the peculiar sensation of watching and being unable to prevent a nasty fall.

Michael Medved once wrote, "America is bizarrely blessed." He was right. For decades our crops never failed. There was abundance in our homes and our lives. Our innovation was unparalleled in the world. People from around the globe wanted to live here in freedom, security, and plenty. Even the poorest among us have clothes to spare and cellphones, for heaven's sake.

Recently, though, it's plain to see that the crown of blessing has been removed. When I woke up this morning and saw this report, I trembled at the implications of it for our military and our security. It's one more piece chronicling our tumbling decent on the world's stage. Never mind that the leakers themselves owe their freedom to those they put at risk. If we lived in a different nation, they'd be carting rocks around in the gulag right now.

Perhaps that's closer than we know.

Jeze-Bill

Back in March, Edmund and I accepted delivery of 21 chicks. We ordered hens—pullets, the chicken-before-the-egg scenario. We dreamt of their lovely eggs-to-be, and cleaned a lot of foul mess from wherever they roamed. Remember? Here are the fruits of our labor.
Pretty, aren't they? Yum! They have richly-hued golden yolks that stand up firmly in the pan, and we're getting a nice variety of colors. The white ones you see above are for contrasting ours with extra-large store eggs. Ours are tiny because our hens are still so young.

Somewhere along the way, one little miss became a bully. She'd peck at the others, boss them around, and pull their feathers out. She was turning into the most beautiful of the bunch, but was undoubtedly the wickedest. Edmund and Lucy dubbed her Jezebel after the beautiful-yet- evil Biblical queen. We wondered what to do to tame her. We put her in time-out. We tried to calm her down. By mid-June, she was a full head taller than the rest. Could it be that she was a he?
At the end of June, Jezebel let out one tortured crow followed by a clear "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" and we knew for sure that "she" wasn't. All that bullying suddenly made a lot more sense, and we began to look for a new moniker. Ahab? Eggburt? Jeze-Bill?

For the record, we still call him Jezebel. The way he treats his harem, I think he deserves it.

Read through the Bible three times a year.

For many years, I have used a one-year Bible reading plan. I've done a number of them, but my favorite was a chronological plan dividing the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, in the order in which the events occurred. There are other chronological plans for reading through in the order the books were written, or reading chronologically from both the Old Testament and the New Testament simultaneously, but I really enjoyed starting in Genesis and ending in Revelation, reading the applicable psalm or prophet while I read through the historical books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles.

Reading straight through the Bible gives you a good sense of the Bible as an entire book, cohesive from start to finish. It boosts your understanding of God's plan and puts everything in context. Unfortunately, I tossed my favorite plan when I started the Old Testament/New Testament type of chronological plan, and I foolishly never saved a copy to the computer.

This year, Peter decided that he wanted to try B90X. We began in January. He finished, I didn't. At present, my goal is just to finish a day ahead of Peter on his second time through. I consistently only have time for 10 pages of the Bible a day, not 12, so I get discouraged and occasionally I skip days. That really messes me up, so I decided to create my own 120 day plan. My Bible is 1196 pages—easy to divide, and I ended up with very few split chapters.

I am happy with it, though eventually I hope to put the psalms and prophets in their correct places in the historical narrative.

You can download it here. Happy reading!

Somethings Just Take Time.

The garden is tilled, hilled, and partially planted. Now we just wait. Fortunately, the start of one project is the end of another. I am so glad the chickens are enjoying the great outdoors.

Pretty flock, don't you agree? The bonus is that they are used to being handled now, and gentle enough to interact with as needed, making clean-up an easier proposition. This week, we are moving their run to a more open area beside the garden in an effort to better protect them from coons and possums.

I hope we'll add some bees in the next month or so. Stay tuned. (I love Spring!)

A Good Friday

We're a fairly informal bunch at my house. We've been celebrating Christmas this week. Today we move on to Passover, and Sunday it'll be the Resurrection.

No, really, I'm not trying to create confusion in my children. I have my reasons....

The Christmas season crept up on me too quickly in December. We decided to go on vacation the second week, and the next thing you know, we were unwrapping gifts. I promised the kids we'd set up the Christmas tree at some point, so we did—last Friday. Over the past week, we made gingerbread, sang a few carols, and read the Christmas story.

Today they are putting the finishing touches on their gingerbread houses, and tonight we celebrate Passover. I've always wanted to, and Good Friday seemed as good a time as ever to have a seder meal. I'll use the lamb shank for our Resurrection Day meal.

The truth is, I love this time of year. It was 19 years ago this weekend that I understood the cross for the first time. I remember the moment it became crystal clear. My friend Kevin was singing a Don Francisco song called He's Alive, and suddenly it made sense to me that God opened the door to heaven through Jesus' death and resurrection. It took about three weeks before I asked God into my life for keeps. Before and since then, I have seen his mighty hand moving powerfully in my life and in others' lives: marriages put back together, illnesses healed, the Prince of Peace bringing peace to confusion and turmoil.

I love this season and the God it celebrates. Why not put it all together and focus on who He is, from beginning—the God of creation, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses—to end? I am so grateful we serve a risen Savior.

Broken or Crushed? Your choice.

"And whoever falls on this stone will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder."

—Matt 21:44

When Peter and I lived and worked in Mozambique, everything seemed to end up opposite of what we hoped and expected. Our infant son faced death a few times, our co-workers were having troubles, other missionaries were bickering, and our sending church had no experience being the sole support for long-term missionaries. It was a toxic mix. I look back and see myself bracing for the repeated onslaught, stiffening myself against the impact of the events of life, and becoming angrier and angrier at God for getting us into the mess in the first place.

He did "get us into it." There was no doubt in either of our minds that God put us exactly where we were, for whatever reason, I couldn't say at the time. From a decade down the road, his hand is evident in all of it, but at the time, all I saw was a rock coming down to crush us.

Instead of running and falling on the Rock, I ran away, fearful of it. Instead of taking all my trouble to God, I sought solace in other places, and became more bitter. I could have had a tight relationship with my Savior because I was willing to fall on Him, instead, I spent about five years after Mozambique forgiving Him and another few years until I was ready to give up my will to Him again. All told, I missed a decade of my life as God intended it to be. How different it would have been had I only been willing to be broken.

The options we are given are not attractive either way to our human minds. But Jesus is insistent that these are the only two responses available to the one who encounters the Chief Corner Stone of life: fall on Him and be broken, or stiffen against Him and be crushed. Remember that our Rock is also the Potter—He has a plan to remake you into a vessel for His honor. Choose well.

Shark on Wheels

The pinewood derby went off well earlier this month, and though Edmund didn't place, he's number one in my book for creativity. Here's his entry:

21 Chickens in My Bathroom.

It's true. There are 21 hen chicks in my bathroom. They've been there since the beginning of March. This is what they looked like then.

Aren't they cute? Isn't the newspaper CLEAN? They were so easily cared for way back then, four weeks ago. Such fluffy little creeters.

This is what they look like now.


They require multiple water changes and destroy the newspaper as soon as we lay it down. Eventually, these gals will be laying beautiful eggs: some brown, some speckled, and some even greenish-blue! In the meanwhile, they'll stay in their cage atop my bathtub, making quite a racket until their feathers grow in and they can move to their permanent digs outside. And I? Well, I content myself dreaming of their future eggs, with deep yellow yolks and lovely shells.