Home & Blog | Lynne Baab

These are a few of my favorite things for the Christmas season

Lynne Baab • Wednesday December 30 2015

1. I “met” this poem when I was in my twenties, and it has remained my favorite Christmas poem: Mary’s Song by Lucy Shaw

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast keep warm this small hot naked star fallen to my arms. (Rest... you who have had so far to come.) Now nearness satisfies the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps whose eyelids have not closed before. His breath (so slight it seems no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps to sprout a world. Charmed by dove’s voices, the whisper of straw, he dreams, hearing no music from his other spheres. Breath, mouth, ears, eyes he is...

Read full article »

What I learned about the incarnation from Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere

Lynne Baab • Friday December 18 2015

I celebrated most of the Christmases of my childhood and early adult life in northern cities in the Northern Hemisphere, where night falls in December long before 5 pm. The most common Christmas imagery in those places draws on the Gospel of John’s description of Jesus as the light of the world. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it” (John 1:5). The dark and broken world needs light, and every evening during the Christmas season the candles and lights in our homes shine in the dark night, and we remember that reality.

It took me a...

Read full article »

Thankfulness and sentness

Lynne Baab • Thursday December 10 2015

When I was a young adult I got to hear John Stott speak about Jesus’ last words to his disciples in John 13 to 17. I remember so many things about those four talks at Urbana 76.

In John 17:18, Jesus says to his disciples, “As the Father sent me into the world, so I send you into the world.” Stott talked about this verse as a foundation that helps us understand what we are called to do on this earth. The notion of being sent into the world as Jesus was sent helps us understand our mission.

A brief note about Bible...

Read full article »

Another thankfulness challenge

Lynne Baab • Wednesday December 2 2015

On the morning after Thanksgiving, my husband Dave said to me, “I found the most amazing passage. It really helps explain why thankfulness matters.”

Here’s the passage, Deuteronomy 8:11-18:

Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your...

Read full article »

<< Newer | Older >>