Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Faith Wasn’t Built In A Day

Image of Rome’s Colosseum by Leonhard Niederwimmer from Pixabay

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day.

I think we can say the same about our faith.

We see hints of this in Scripture:

“The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ ” (Luke 17:5)

“The father instantly cried out, ‘I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief!’ ” (Mark 9:24)

Steadfast trust in God’s promises and character is something that is gradually established in us, brick by brick, year by year.

Take Abraham, for example. This hero of the Old Testament is held out in the book of Hebrews as a paragon of faith.

But he didn’t start out that way. In fact, his record in the faith department was a bit spotty for a while. God had to build up his faith over time…

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Christmas Fruitcake Hack

Do you like Christmas fruitcake? Or do you just pretend to?

Some people look forward to making or receiving fruitcakes at this time of year. Other people dread the prospect of eating fruitcake yet again.

If you’ve been faking enjoyment of Christmas fruitcake all these years and would really rather not eat any more of it, I think I have a solution for you:

Make Christmas fruitcake cookies instead.

I hit upon this idea years ago and have never looked back. I liked some of the ingredients in fruitcake, but was never fond of the dense, molasses-y cake surrounding them.

With fruitcake cookies, however, you keep the best parts of fruitcake and add more butter. You also omit the ingredients that are unpalatable to you. The recipe is thereby transformed into something completely new. What results is a scrumptious cookie that is a crowd-pleaser whenever I serve it.

In the same way, isn’t that sort of what God does in our lives? When we become believers in Jesus, God keeps the best parts of us and adds the Holy Spirit. As we become more like Jesus, the unpalatable aspects of us are gradually left behind: our impatience, pride, lack of generosity, selfishness, etc.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Perfect Christmas?

Photo by Adam Clark on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

What’s your idea of the perfect Christmas? Many of us have images in our minds of what the ideal Yuletide should look like.

It usually involves a spectacular Christmas tree with enticing gifts piled beneath it. The house would be decorated with pine boughs and red bows inside, and the exterior decked out with lights. The day itself would feature a scrumptious dinner with all the fixings, and numerous home-baked desserts. Top it all off with a house full of family, friends and laughter.

There’s only one problem with this picture.

It’s awfully hard to live up to.

Perhaps you were laid off from your job just before Christmas. Or maybe you’re employed, but things are still really tight financially. You just can’t provide all the gifts that your children have been asking for, and you know they might be disappointed.

Or maybe someone in your family is going through a health crisis. It looks serious, and you’re all under a lot of stress as a result. It might be hard to feel “merry” this Christmas.

It could be that you have some fractured or broken relationships in your life. Maybe things are very tense with a certain family member. Or perhaps you’ve lost someone dear to you, and this will be the first Christmas without them. The holidays might be a lonely time for you.

There are a lot of reasons why the Christmas season might fall short of what we want it to be.

But when you think about it, the first Christmas was fraught with struggles, too. Mary and Joseph certainly didn’t have it easy.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Yes, Virginia, There Really Is A Jesus Christ!

Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay

If you still believe in Santa Claus, please avert your eyes from the screen right now.

I’ll wait.

For the rest of you, how old were you when you realized that there wasn’t really a Santa Claus?

Five or six? Nine or ten? Thirty?

For me, the realization came on bit by bit over the years when I was little.

First off, on the gift tags on my Christmas presents, I noticed that the “To Lori, Love Santa” inscription was written in handwriting that looked an awful lot like my Mom’s. In fact, exactly like hers. I realized that it was, in fact, my Mom’s handwriting, not Santa’s.

That was my first inkling that something was up with this whole Santa thing.

Later on, I saw a notice in the newspaper that Santa would be visiting the Eaton Centre, a major mall in downtown Toronto. I was so excited! I could get my picture taken with the real Santa!

But then I saw another ad touting Santa’s visit to another mall on the same day. At the exact same time. How could Santa be in two places at once? That seemed a bit fishy to me. It slowly dawned on me that it wasn’t really Santa, but merely regular people in Santa costumes.

As an older but wiser young person, I came to discover that a lot of people I’d thought were real were in fact fictitious. Not just Santa and the Tooth Fairy, but others as well. There isn’t even a real Betty Crocker—she’s merely a creation of advertisers.

It’s always disillusioning when you discover that something you once believed in isn’t true after all.

But how comforting it is to know that there really was a Jesus Christ.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Most Dazzling Christmas Light

Photo by Paul Vladuchick on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

What’s your favourite Christmas tradition? Is it exchanging gifts, baking special desserts, decorating the tree, or perhaps wearing ugly Christmas sweaters?

For many of us, our most cherished Christmas tradition probably involves lights, whether they’re on your own Christmas tree, or decorating houses in your neighbourhood.

Some people go all out, putting tens of thousands of lights on their home. There’s even a long-running TV reality show called “The Great Christmas Light Fight,” in which families compete against each other to create elaborate Christmas light displays.

This season is inextricably linked to lights, but might we have missed the most important light of all?

We’re putting up Christmas lights in houses and on streets that are already well lit. The colourful lights are beautiful and bring us joy, but don’t really provide much extra illumination. We seem to have all the light we need.

But maybe we don’t realize how much darkness we’re really in. With our busy, self-sufficient lives, we may not recognize that we’re lacking a different sort of light, one that resides inside of us.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

A Special Kind of Faith

Tulip bulbs at a flower market
Photo from Pxhere, Public Domain

They say that planting seeds is an act of faith.

I think that’s true: you put seeds in the ground in spring, hoping most will germinate and grow into a plant. If you’re lucky, you might see hints of growth in a few days, but often it can be weeks before a little green head pokes its way out of the soil.

If planting seeds takes faith, then I think it takes a special act of faith to plant bulbs in the fall.

In the fall, you know the days are getting shorter and colder. The leaves are dropping from the trees, and tender plants are beginning to die from early frosts. You know that snow will soon blanket the garden to the depth of a couple feet.

You’re heading into a barren season.

The precious tulip, daffodil, or hyacinth bulbs that you’ve just planted will disappear from your view for many months. You’ll have no indication that they’re all right, let alone any guarantee that they’ll eventually bloom. They may fall prey to rabbits, squirrels or deer. Who knows what will happen to them?

And yet you still go ahead and plant fall bulbs, trusting that they’ll survive the frigid winter and bloom later in spring.

Some things in our lives take special faith to trust for, too, don’t they?

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Jam the Signal!

The tiger moth Bertholdia trigona is the only animal in nature known to jam
the echolocation of its predator
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Bats are crafty creatures.

Being nocturnal, bats search for food at night, but their night vision is fairly poor. So instead they use echolocation, or reflected sound, to home in on insects such as moths. Their built-in sonar directs them to the precise location of the tasty morsels; then it’s just a matter of swooping in and gobbling them up.

So the bats’ prey have to be crafty as well.

Certain species of tiger moth have the ability to emit sonar of their own. As a bat is closing in, the moth emits a fusillade of ultrasonic clicks. This barrage blurs and disrupts the bat’s echolocation: the signal is essentially jammed. The baffled hunter can no longer “see” the moth, and is tricked into thinking its target has vanished. Thwarted, the hungry predator flies away, and the prey is safe.

Our little tiger moth beats its enemy at its own game.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could “jam the signal” of the enemy of our soul? If we could disrupt and counter the lies the world tells us about ourselves?

In fact, there’s a way that we can.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Lest We Forget

View from D-Day Landing Craft, June 6, 1944

Each year we mark November 11th as Remembrance Day in Canada (Veterans Day in the US).

On this special day, we remember the servicemen and -women who lost their lives to ensure the freedom we cherish so deeply today.

The numbers are staggering: it’s estimated that over 400,000 U.S. military personnel lost their lives during World War II. The US National D-Day Memorial Foundation estimates that over 4,000 Allied servicemen lost their lives on June 6, 1944 (D-Day) alone.

The fatalities during World War I are equally appalling, with close to 60,000 Canadians having lost their lives in service. The best estimate of war historians is that over 140,000 Allied soldiers lost their lives during the hellish Battle of the Somme alone in 1916 (including my great-uncle Pte. Robert John Tisdale, still in his teens).

The numbers who lost their lives in the Korean War, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and others only adds to the toll of war’s terrible cost.

But wait a minute…every sentence I just wrote contained a mistake. Did you spot it?

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Fill Up Your Storehouse

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

This is a busy (and nutty) time of year for squirrels.

The little critters are hard at work storing up nuts and seeds for the hard winter ahead.

Depending on the species, they may either store their nuts in one spot (a stash), or hide them by burying them in multiple locations (known as “scatter-hoarding”). They’ve even been known to shamelessly steal nuts from the stashes of other squirrels.

The jury is out on whether squirrels actually remember where they’ve hidden all those nuts. Some studies suggest they can recall the location of thousands of buried nuts. Other research implies that squirrels fail to recover a good number of their treasures, which allows the nuts and acorns to grow into trees.

One thing is for certain: these little guys are single-minded about gathering up nuts before winter, often using unconventional places to store them.

Like cars.

Just ask Bill Fischer of Fargo, North Dakota. For the past eight years, a red squirrel has been using Bill’s pickup truck to store walnuts. Each year, the poor man has to remove thousands of walnuts from every crevice of his truck, including the engine compartment and bumpers.

The critter set a new record several years ago, stashing 348 pounds of nuts in Bill’s vehicle. And this was all the work of one tiny squirrel.

These crafty little animals might exasperate us, but we can learn something from them:

They make sure they’ve “squirrelled away” provision for hard times to come.

I think we should do something similar:

Store up the Word of God in your heart, because you never know when you might need a certain verse to sustain you in a tough situation.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Master of Disguise

What’s the best Halloween costume you’ve ever seen (or worn)?

I’m particularly fond of costumes involving puns.

Like the fellow who wore a tuxedo with the word “Sorry” pinned to his shirt and went out trick-or-treating as “a formal apology.”

Or the lady who taped a dozen photocopies of pictures of her cat to her shirt. Alert people recognized her costume as that of a “copy cat.”

A simple and clever Halloween costume involves wearing a Groucho Marx-style fake nose and glasses combo, along with a name tag that reads: “Blessing.” This makes you a “blessing in disguise”!

Did you know that Jesus occasionally appeared “in disguise”?

There were a few times after Jesus’ resurrection when His friends didn’t immediately recognize Him. It seems His identity was obscured from them temporarily.

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