Merry Christmas my beautiful blog readers! I am so grateful for your company each day! I hope that you are enjoying your Christmas with your loved ones.

This year I am so grateful to be enjoying Christmas again.

As only a church musician can understand….after many many years of spending my Christmas mornings rushing to church and setting up and sacrificing my family time so that others can enjoy their morning, and the preceding weeks spent planning and stressing…I eventually became numb to Christmas. It was just another source of stress and busy-ness. It got to the point where it meant very little….even that it was a relief when it was over. It was empty on a personal level. I enjoyed the ministering, but it was at the expense of so much else that I am seeing is far more important.

Then came the year where I was so resentful of the church that I didn’t want anything to do with Christmas and if I had heard another Christmas carol I thought I was going to go postal.

This year, for the first time in many years, I am peaceful and free and finally enjoying contemplating Jesus and his amazing gift of life, love, peace, grace and freedom.

There are those that want to detract from the glorious freedom in Christ and focus on the bondage of the past on this day of celebration, but blogger Lee Bezotte puts it much better than I ever could. We choose to celebrate Jesus on this day we call Christmas. Our God is big enough to redeem what was once meant to serve someone else and take the strategic advantage for his purposes! If this is the one day of the year some people set foot in church…let’s rock it!

I am loving it! I am revelling in the freedom of Christ. I am SO grateful for his gift of life and grace and freedom! I am relieved that this celebration of Jesus is regenerating my soul day by day.

God’s richest blessings to you all! See you in the new year!

My eleven year old son has a rather peculiar sense of humour and a talent for the bizarre. This year I finished up at work a week before Christmas and had some time up my sleeve to do some fun stuff with the kids. Shel decided that he wanted to make a gingerbread outhouse. OOOOOK

It should be said that I don’t bake. I haven’t in years. Mainly because I work full-time, and just don’t have the time to do it, and secondly because I’m a lo-carber with an addiction to baked goods…so if I don’t have them in the house I can’t eat them.

Google came to the rescue with a recipe and instructions for a gingerbread house that I planned to redesign. I made the dough and refrigerated it. So far so good. When the morning came I was excited to take the dough out of the fridge and get on with the creation of walls and roof….and toilet….. but it wasn’t to be. The dough was too runny, and no matter how much extra flour I worked into it, it remained gooey. So I gave up and turned that batch into biscuits.

It was at this point that I figured that I had forfeited my domestic goddess badge somewhere along the way when I went back to work.

My good friend Ed came to the rescue with his wife’s no-fail gingerbread recipe and I started the process again. Immediately I could tell that this one was going to work better…the dough actually acted like dough. Always a good start! Into the fridge it went.

The dough rolled out like a dream! All was going to plan! I was starting to get my hopes up and stopped threatening to abort the process early.

Grandpa (former civil engineer) had drafted a plan for the said outhouse and it was a thing of beauty…however, there wasn’t quite enough dough to get all the pieces cut out so a quick redesign on the fly was conducted.

Here’s what we ended up with:

The gingerbread outhouse...complete with silly grins from the decorators

 The boys decorated the outhouse while I wielded the piping bag full of royal icing…

Shel decided that the detail should be as realistic as possible...

The interior detail included a chamber pot, “straw” toilet paper and “number 2s” where someone had either missed the pot or hadn’t been bothered emptying the pot for awhile.

*throws hands up in the air* Boys! At least they were taking an interest in domesticity

Have you ever deviated from the norm with baked goods? Would love to hear about your adventures!

I’ve sort of fallen off the blogging bandwagon a little in the last couple of months. I think all of my words got expended writing uni assignments. With the silly season upon us, it’s probably not going to get better anytime soon, but I wanted to tell you about a breakthrough I’ve had in my thinking lately.

Photo credit: Ayla87

I’ve been working with a life coach to get rid of a lot of old negative, destructive thinking and behavioural patterns, and replacing them with positive, constructive, uplifting thoughts, habits and behaviours. It has been spectacularly helpful to have an objective observer ask pointed questions about what she saw to be unproductive elements of my life, and then help me work through changing those and moving on to the next phase of life. (If you’ve interested in life coaching I can recommend a couple of brilliant ones.)

One of the things that I am working on in particular at the moment is simplifying my life. Looking at each element and deciding whether or not they contribute to the ultimate direction and passions in my life, and getting rid of the things that are dragging me down. This applies not only to life choices, but to my environment too. My house. The places I choose to spend time. Mine are far too cluttered at the moment, so I’ll be spending my holidays doing a HUGE clean out and getting rid of tons of books, knick knacks that do nothing more than collect dust, the boys artwork from when they were five (I’ll photograph those instead), wool that I’ve collected that I am probably never going to knit up (as much as I love knitting, I love drawing more). All this stuff is dead weight. It’s slowing me down. Because I have to dust and clean these things…that means I don’t have as much time to build relationships with my family. Catch my drift?

I’ve removed a ship-load of mental clutter in the last month or so, and I can feel the breeze on my face as I start to build up some momentum. Now it’s time to do the same in my physical realm. I am looking forward to a much more free and simple life in the days ahead. I’m not planning to go bare-bones minimalist, but the less crap I have blocking my way, the more I can actually live my life.

Less complications.

More simplicity.

Peace.

Space to hear God.

Creating margin.

Able to run with new opportunities and challenges!

Freedom!

It’s like riding a bike…coasting down a hill…sun on my face…fresh breeze whooshing by!

The adrenaline rush is exhilarating!

Live life!

Enjoy life!

Love life!

Have you ever had a big clear out in your life? How did it feel? What was your catalyst?