Christmas 2022 - Photo Diary
Photo diary of Christmas 2022
Christmas Week
The week before Christmas environment Canada put out a notice that there was going to be a big winter storm. Since I had been planning to drive up to my parent’s house on Christmas Eve, I quickly changed my plan and drove up two days early to get ahead of the storm. With this being the case, I had to bring both of my cats, and do my Christmas baking in my parents’ kitchen. It also gave me more time with my family. ♥️
Christmas Eve
On Christmas Eve my family has the tradition of eating picnic style finger food in the living room in front of the Christmas tree. And usually we would also go to a Christmas Eve service at my parents’ church, but this year the storm caused us to turn around and stay cozy inside instead.
My parents’ bought my niece a fancy Christmas dress. And we exchanged presents with my brother’s girlfriend, Tiffany.
Then we video called Beth and Allysin who were coming up later on Christmas day.
For Christmas, my siblings and I gave my parents a book with a collection of photos from the year:
Sneak Peek: Jeff & Bobbie
This past weekend I met up with a family friend and her fiance to take some photos to celebrate their engagement. All I can say is that the light we were blessed with. . . . * chef’s kiss *
This past weekend I met up with a family friend and her fiance to take some photos to celebrate their engagement. All I can say is that the light we were blessed with. . . . * chef’s kiss *
Book Thoughts: The Significance of Singleness
I just finished reading book #14 of 2020 - The Significance of Singleness by Christina S. Hitchcock - which means I’m pretty much on track for reading 2 books each month.
This book. So good!
I would like to encourage - if you are a pastor or church leader, please read this book.
If you volunteer with youth or young adults, please read this book.
If you are a single Christian of any age, please read this book.
I live in Canada, and in my context, growing up in the 90s with a constant intake of Disney films and pop music, romance seemed not only inevitable, but also the pinnacle of what being human is made for.
It probably doesn’t help that i seem to have a naturally romantic bent to my being and a penchant for storytelling. … I fell in love for the first time in kindergarten, and wrote my first novel in high school.
But I don’t think I’m unusual.
I think we are groomed from the day we’re born to believe the best stories are love stories.
And that the only truly fulfilling love, the one that will complete you and make you feel whole, is romantic love.
As we gain distance from the idyllic sunny, nuclear family stories that we told and believed in the 90s, romantic love has spread to encompass just sex.
Sexual expression is seen as a mark of being an adult.
We make fun of people who are virgins past their early 20s, assuming that there must be something wrong with them, or that they belong to some oppressive thought that they must be freed from to know what it’s truly like to be fully human. Or perhaps they’re immature or are hiding some dark secret? (There’s NO WAY they’re actually a virgin!)
In this social setting - where we view soul mates as our saviours, and sex as an integral part of the human experience - Christianity, instead of standing strong, also caved and began sharing the same story except with one caveat - you must be married, and be married to someone of the opposite sex, to experience this height of humanity. No wonder we have nothing authoritative to say in the face of LGBT or polyamorous relationships.
Christina steps into this space and corrects the church.
This is not the foundations of our belief.
Christianity was founded and is built around a perfect human man who lived into his 30s.
The most perfect human. Perfectly whole. Perfectly holy. The image of God humanity was created to be. God himself come all the way to meet us where we are.
And yet he never married, never had sex.
After this celibacy, and life long singleness, was seen as a completely valid way for Christ followers to live.
Not because there isn’t something beautiful or unique in marriage, but because all of our desires are designed to point us back to God. We’ve all experienced the realization that the thing we longed for, the thing we assumed would finally make us fully happy, doesn’t. Every raise comes with our gaze on the next one. Each purchase only lasts so long. And each romantic relationship eventually lets us down.
As Christians we believe that this is because the fulfilment of our desires is found solely in God, and this will happen fully and perfectly in the age to come.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is our proof.
How much hope this can give us!!
We don’t need to keep striving.
I don’t need to convince a man to choose me. And I don’t have to fight to keep his attention.
Why? Because there is more to life than this.
My identity.
My hope.
My provisions.
My security.
Comes first and foremost through God, who through Jesus, has proven that he is faithful, trustworthy, and will not let me down. He is with us always. Even when others abandon us, or die, or simply can’t understand - God is there closer than our very hearts.
Into this context someone like David Bennett (a celibate, gay Christian) can say things like, “Our sexuality is not the whole point. Rather our sexuality points to something greater. … Don’t make this life the whole point. If I don’t get a sexual partner for 40 years of my life, so what!”
Honestly, I’ve written all these words, but Ed Shaw sums it up way more succinctly, and better than I have.
He said,
“I know there are many today who think that it is a great tragedy to die a virgin. But I hope I will. Because I know that I will not have lost out on anything too significant. Because the Bible teaches me that I will have missed only the brief foretaste that sex is meant to be of the eternal reality of the perfect union between Christ and His church that I will one day experience forever (Revelation 21:1-5). Any fleeting pleasure I’ve given up in the meantime will be more than worth it then.”
I hope I can catch this vision so deeply, so fully. I want to live by this story, not simply because it’s true, but because it’s better.
Marriage is this one flesh union meant to metaphor the union of Christ and the church in the age to come.
Singleness is also a metaphor of the same thing - by living in that promise now. Trusting him completely to care for our needs.
Someone I follow states the Christian belief around sex as - faithfulness in marriage (one man, one woman, for one life in a covenant relationship). Chastity in singleness.
I daily aim for this standard - chastity as a single person, which has led me to be let down by friends who claimed to believe the same thing as me. And also leads to me being a very boring bachelorette party invite - no first kiss or ‘how I lost my virginity’ stories here!
Often the traditional, Biblical sex ethic is seen as harmful - what about loneliness? What about suicide?
And these are topics that Christians should be deeply, deeply concerned about and be actively involved in righting. But the way to do it is not by loosening our standard so we can join culture in elevating sex and romance, but rather by telling the better fuller story of Christ.
Culture tells us that loneliness and hopelessness is solved by finding “my person”.
So of course when we can’t find that person, or when that person leaves us, or when it just doesn’t work out, or they pass away, or let us down, we feel like our lives are purposeless or worthless.
Church! Stop sharing in this story!
Our story is out of this world better!
Whether we get all we want in this life, or have to sacrifice everything - our hope is in a coming age when, not only will death no longer hold any power, but all of our deepest desires and longings will be fulfilled perfectly - exactly as we need and hope they will - in our union with Christ.
Our life purpose - our hope - our happiness/joy - does not rest on our ability to achieve or maintain a romantic or sexual relationship.
What a relief!
Anyway, enough blathering by me.
All of this was to say, please read this book so you can begin to see the purpose and hope that single Christians are pointing to in the very way they live.
And after catching the meaning, the vision, the story, jump in and be the “homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields” that Jesus promises to those who have to give these very things up to follow him.
Be the family of God - interconnected to one another through our relationship with Christ.
Be the church.
Online Dating
This week I decided to quit online dating.
A decision that might seem abrupt, but one that has been festering in the back of my mind for awhile.
I’ve been online dating for more than a year consistently now, and prior to that had online dated off and on for several years.
This time I had decided to commit.
I paid to use the apps instead of relying on their free features, and committed to going on a coffee date with anyone who asked me out, even if I had the suspicion that we wouldn’t be compatible for more than that. I messaged first, and A/B tested which messages got responses. And when guys didn’t take the initiative and ask me out, I asked first.
But after almost two years of online dating, I have received many hookup requests, but haven’t gone on a single, actual date. Guys who were responsive stopped replying before actually meeting in person, or responded with, “Let’s skip coffee and head to the bedroom instead.”
It felt like time after time men were saying, you’re pretty enough and worth enough to meet for sex, but not worth getting a cup of coffee. Like they wanted my body, but not me.
It reminds me of my friend Becky.
In my early twenties I was so jealous of her.
Tall and thin with wild curls, big blue eyes and this perfect sprinkle of freckles, she carried herself like a summer day - spontaneity and femininity wrapped in beautiful skies. She and I, and a couple of other friends met every week or two to sit in the back booth at Coffee Culture and eat chicken caesar wraps, and pieces of of cake that we affectionately labelled “diabetes cake.” All of us single at the time, we would talk about God and our lives, but mostly we would talk about our desires and hopes to be married and start families and the guys we met, and the guys we liked.
But whereas I struggled to capture the attention of guys, they flocked to Becky.
I remember her saying though that the issue was that they didn’t like her - not the her that existed. They liked the way she looked. They liked the her they imagined in their mind, the her they wanted her to be.
At the time I remember thinking it was rubbish.
The type of thing pretty girls say to seem relatable.
But, Becky - if you read this - I apologise for brushing your complaint off.
I understand now.
It feels like over and over online dating has been me asking for relationship, and guys asking for sex without having to give relationally at all. And over and over me saying that sex is only available to someone who is willing to pay the cost of commitment (usually not even bothering to include that by commitment I mean life long marriage, because they won’t respond even when they assume I mean several dates). And them saying that they only want sex, and no or little, or maybe if you’re good enough, some, commitment.
And I’m not trying to bash men.
I assume there are so many men out there who are also looking for committed relationships where they can build a stable partnership and family.
Online dating just hasn’t proven to be the place where I can find it.
In general I actually disagree with online dating.
The idea of people trying to advertise, “sell”, themselves to get attention, and love, and commitment, and relationship, and yes, even sex.
A bartering market where we try to get what we want, with as little self cost as possible.
Our appearances, and profiles the currency we have to pay with. Each person worth only what someone else is willing to give.
I don’t think it’s good for people to see each other this way, as a commodity.
I think we’re creating greater and greater disparities between those who fit certain attractive norms and those who don’t. Men who will never commit because they don’t have to to get what they think they want.
Women who will give what they only want to give in a committed relationship to a first time meet up because they think it will earn someone’s devotion or commitment.
And of course, the unattractive being excluded from each because we now have a seemingly unlimited number of choices to swipe through.
Statistics are showing similar things with small groups of people ending up with a large number of the matches.
And with over half of relationships starting through online dating, they’re 2x more likely to breakup than those who met in more traditional ways, and those who actually marry - 12% will divorce in the first 3 years, compared to 2% of those who met offline.
So like I said, my decision to quit has been a long time coming, but it does not feel easy.
Where else will I ever meet someone?
As someone who, thus far, has been terminally single, deleting my dating app profiles feels like turning off the only light in a dark room.
The extinguishing of hope.
It feels like resignation that the one desire I have held throughout my entire life is never going to be fulfilled for me.
But what is that quote, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
Almost two years of online dating, and not a single date.
And I can feel the toll of being spoken to poorly, being seen overly sexualized by others.
It’s exhausting receiving messages almost daily asking you for some sexual act. A complete stranger. Unsolicited. Asking if you would be willing to do this or that, if you’re into certain types of fantasies and role playing, or threesomes with them and their partner where you are not allowed to expect any sort of commitment or emotional support on their part.
It feels degrading - less than human.
Then there is the constant unanswered messages from people you match with.
Or the ghosting from people you feel a connection with, where they suddenly stop responding without explanation, and as much as you remind yourself it has nothing to do with you - your mind still churns, trying to find a cause so you can change and have a different result the next time.
Maybe both have always been hopeless.
But logging into my dating apps daily at least gave the illusion of there being potential.
Maybe today is the day I meet someone who will be different, treat me different!
A new message!
Maybe this is the one where someone actually is interested in getting to know me!
Only to open it and read, “So do you wax, or are you full bush down there?” “Wait. Are you a virgin? Does that mean you’ve never had an orgasm?” From complete strangers - men I’ve never even had a conversation with before.
Actually, most of the bad comments or conversations, I’ve never even talked about.
I know it’s nonsensical, but somehow I feel embarrassed, humiliated, that someone would say those things to me.
That they would think so little of me that they would feel it appropriate to say what they said. . . .
Monday morning I woke from a nightmare.
My heart was pounding.
So fast that it felt like if you were standing close to me you would be able to hear it.
I opened my eyes in the dark and waited for the awareness that it was a dream to slow the beats.
It didn’t.
I got out of bed and turned on the light to dispel the darkness, and with it the last of the dream fragments and my pounding heart.
It didn’t.
I got a drink of water, and still my heart drummed on.
I’ve had some heart palpitation problems before - usually after working out or something like that, so I tried not to panic.
But never before has the uncontrollable speed come from nothing.
I searched the symptoms women commonly experience if they’re having a heart attack, as I became concerned.
”Do I call an ambulance?” I worried to myself.
I had basically none of the heart attack symptoms, but the pounding was so vicious that going back to sleep was impossible.
The sound was intrusive, vibrating rhythmically in every vein.
i got up and got dressed, and decided to drive myself to the hospital a few blocks from my house. (Still unsure if this was the right thing to do, or if I should have called an ambulance.)
At the emerge they took my pulse, and immediately moved me to a room.
The nurse seemed calm, and being someone who came from a family with people who tend to be dramatic while sick, I’ve pendulum swung too far the other way, and was trying to act like I was fine. Not wanting to burden the staff with complaints or over exaggerations.
So between the two of us, I didn’t realize that they were concerned.
I’ve never been to this emerge, so I didn’t know that they had put me in the rooms reserved for resuscitations, and not a regular emerge room.
It was only later that the doctor would let me know that my heart was beating at 200 beats per minute when the nurse had done my intake at 7:30am.
She was strapping me into heart, pulse and blood pressure monitors as quickly as possible, letting me know that they would get my heart slowed down soon.
”Good,” I replied with dry humour, “I’m starting to feel a bit exhausted.”
Almost immediately after the monitor was placed, my heart rate slowed.
And so I spent almost all of Monday looking at yellow walls, and having lab techs and nurses draw blood and perform x-rays.
While I waited for the doctor to come and tell me if I’m okay or in danger.
And wished a nurse would stop by and unhook me from things so I could use a washroom.
And trying to conserve the battery life on my phone, since I didn’t know how long I would be there.
It was then - bored, with nothing to occupy my time, and faced with my own mortality.
Knowing that if this heart problem was serious, that there was nothing in my conscious control I could do about it. There was no conscious command I had been able to give to slow my heart rate. No deep breathing. No calming technique.
It was then I finally admitted it was time to give up online dating.
Another thing that felt completely outside of my control, but I had been pretending it was.
I think us humans like to pretend that we’re in charge of way more than we think we are.
So many things had to fall into place for any single one of us to exist. Certain people meeting, and moving, and educating, certain sperm, certain eggs, certain genetics - and yet here we are: walking miracles.
And so many things have to fall into place to survive each day.
One mistake, one split second decision and we could be in car accidents, or falls or a million different external accidents.
Or in my case, an internal one - an errant biological electrical signal.
The doctor eventually came back to inform me that they would be sending me home with a holter heart monitor for a few days, but they were fairly certain I have SVT.
Supraventricular tachycardia.
”An abnormally fast or erratic heartbeat that affects the heart's upper chambers. A result of faulty electrical signaling in your heart. It's commonly brought on by premature beats.”
Thankfully most people with SVT live normal lives.
Some need pace makers.
Out of the heart issues to have - this seems to be one of the better ones.
But it could have been something else.
My body could have betrayed me in a million more detrimental ways.
One faulty signal.
One blood clot.
One hormone out of balance.
Human bodies are fragile, and every day I rely on the provision of God to wake up and breathe knowing that all of us have days that are numbered, and one day I will breathe no more, until the coming of the kingdom of God and we are raised from the dead just as Christ was, to breathe again.
In the same way, human relationships are fragile.
A million different things had to happen for my parents to meet.
From my grandparents both immigrating to the same southern Ontario city, to my parents being born within a certain number of years of each other, to my mom’s ex-husband and my dad’s ex-fiance both working in medical care and being invited to the same party.
I know we like to imagine that we are in control of our destiny, that we choose, and I think we do play an important role, but it also seems like a lot of things have to come together for people to come together.
So, to me, marriage seems like a miracle too.
Maybe I’m just ready to stop putting my hope in disappointing things - not in my own ability to make something happen, but in a God who holds all things together and will one day set all things right.
I sincerely hope that he orchestrates me meeting someone and getting married as well. But even if he doesn’t - I pray that I will know him well enough to trust that he is both generous and good, regardless of my circumstances.
YouTube Videos/Resources on how Online Dating is Shifting Culture
The Modern Dating Economy, James Bloodworth
Man+Woman In Covenant Makes Future. Bio-libertarianism, the Individual and the Marriage Crisis
JON BIRGER - All The Single Ladies, Put Your Hands Up And Listen To This Episode!
Advent 2020
Advent 2020
Hold On Beloved. Resurrection Day Approaches.
PLAYLIST
I put together a playlist for Advent, and I’m sure I will continue to add songs as I come across them. You can listen to the playlist on Spotify here.
I’m also trying to keep all the instrumental songs together at the very end of the list so if you want to listen while reading or just in the background, there’s a couple songs there. :)
DEVOTIONALS
ADVENT, A THREAD IN THE NIGHT by E.M. Welcher.
This is the book I’m using for for my Instagram Lives.
ADVENT REFLECTIONS by The BibleProject
ADVENT 2020: JESUS CHRIST IS BORN by She Reads Truth
In my own private readings I am using both The Bible Project and She Reads Truth stories.
ACTIVITIES
Both of these were put together by my sister Allysin as part of a youth program we run.
DAY #1 (December 1st)
I’ll keep the resources for each day listed here so that you can easily find them. :)
Oh How We Need Advent (This Year More Than Most) by E.M. Welcher
Luke 1
"Waiting is our destiny, as creatures who cannot by themselves bring about what they hope for; we wait in the darkness for a flame we cannot light. We wait in fear for a happy ending we cannot write, we wait for a 'not yet' that feels like a 'not ever'. -Lewis Smedes
Advent Activity: Decorate your Christmas tree (or random plant, or bookshelf, or whatever)
DAY #2 (December 2nd)
“God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”
― Dietrich BonhoefferAdvent Activity:
DAY #3 (December 3rd)
"Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent...the door is shut, and can only be opened from outside." --Dietrich Bonhoeffer
DAY #4 (December 4th)
“Waiting for the Lord is akin to waiting for a sunrise. We do so with both anticipation of the beauty to come and patience knowing it won't be quick. Differently from witing for a train or a stoplight to change, we wait knowing that if we pay close attention, we'll see the sky slowly changing, in time new colours emerge, one after the other, new and radiant with each progressing moment.
How foolish it would be to wait for sunrise with only the occasional glance to see if it has risen yet, instead of savouring the sunrise unfold.” -Author Unknown
DAY #5 (December 5th)
“The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before ... What is possible is to not see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you. And you begin to grasp what it was you missed, like Moses in the cleft of the rock, watching God’s [back] fade in the distance. So stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait. Behold. Wonder. There will be time enough for running. For rushing. For worrying. For pushing. For now, stay. Wait. Something is on the horizon.” Jan Richardson
DAY #6 (December 6th)
“...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
DAY #7 (December 7th)
“To predispose our mind to welcome the Lord who, as we say in the Creed, one day will come to judge the living and the dead, we must learn to recognize him as present in the events of daily life. Therefore, Advent is, so to speak, an intense training that directs us decisively toward him who already came, who will come, and who comes continuously.” - Pope John Paul the Second
DAY #8 (December 8th)
“The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honour the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery…. Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
DAY #9 (December 9th)
"Advent Prayer
In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope
which runs so quickly to fatigue
and in this season of yearning
which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edges of our fingertips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
and come in your weakness
and make all things new.
Amen.” - Walter Bruggeman