A Christmas Letter

Hello everyone,

Happy New Year from sunny Queensland, Australia.  I hope you had a blessed Christmas and a safe New Year celebration.

As it's the 21st century, I'm posting the Matthias Christmas letter on the blog.  I'm also beginning a new series on Two for One (the blog that Ryan and I share) called:  Stories I've Forgotten - Bible Episodes that I Don't Remember Reading, or Wanted to Forget.

Welcome to our family.

2015 – Twelve Mostly Factual Things That Happened.  (Inspired by real events)

1      January

(entry taken from Reid’s fictitious 2015 journal – none of these thoughts actually were written down, but they should have been…)

I woke up in fear this morning.  I’m old, well, old-ish.  Forty-one years old and now, starting today, I’ll have three daughters in high school.  Jeesh, where did the time go?  Elsa’s in eleventh grade; Josephine, ninth; Greta seventh.  I keep looking at all the baby pictures and those cherubic faces of little girls gracing our walls.  Up to this point I’ve done a pretty good job of ignoring the fact that now there are a gazillion bras on the line every time we do the laundry.

Now that I’m in my forties, I should probably think about when the mid-life crisis is going to swerve at me out of control down the highway of life.  I would guess that I avoided one of them just this last week:  I got a call to be a pastor at a school/church in Western Australia.  Christine and I flew out there to visit – the five hour flight was not my beautiful wife’s favorite thing.  I didn’t know fingerprints were strong enough to leave indents, but let’s just say my forearms bear the marks of her terror.  We didn’t take the call (every time it’s called that, I think of Tarzan calling the apes to himself), but it did reinforce the imposition of our own roots here in the Lockyer Valley.   When we returned, Elsa, especially wanted to know if we were going to take it.  Her words were, “Whatever God has planned for you, I’ll accept that,” which is pretty amazing for a kid entering her 11^th grade year of high school, but her face told a different story.  “Dad, if you move now, I’m going to start wearing dark makeup and dating boys named ‘Biff.’”

We made the right choice.

2      February

Okay, so now I’m forty-two.  It’s just a number, right?  Well, it is, until you think, I’ve double the number of years since my twenty-first birthday party.  That gets me back to reflecting.  We had my twenty-first birthday at my grandparents’ house in Frederika, Iowa.  I won’t go into incriminating details, but let’s just say about twenty of us including our parents and high school baseball coach stayed up well past the bewitching hour.  Twenty-one.  Now, that I’m twice that age, I can barely stay up at night until 21:00.  Where did my nocturnal stamina go?  Where is my ability to socialize?  Where is my hair?

The girls participated in the swimming carnival today.  I don’t know why they call it a ‘carnival’ in Australia.  Its origins are Latin – you know, Carnivale, must have something to do with meat.  Every time I think of a carnival, I think of clowns and elephants, the circus.  But when applied to swimming… Well, I guess it’s kind of a circus.  There were a few kids swimming in tutus, a Batman outfit and angel wings.  Our girls did well – Greta won overall; Elsa and Josephine finished second in their respective ages.  Pretty good swimmers obviously taking after their mother because my ability to swim came from years of training at Wood’s lake amidst the frogs and bugs and fear of putting my head under the water for fear of incubating e coli. 

3      March

Ah, the march of time.  Josephine is now a teenanger.  I mis-wrote that; it was supposed to be teenager, but the slip is completely Freudian.  She’s not angry in any way, but the thought that she is no longer a little girl is, as Rusty and Audrey would say from National Lampoon’s Vacation – Weirdorama.  Working with teenagers every day of my work life perhaps is where more of the ‘teen-anger’ issue comes from.   We live in a world that is strangely enamored with rage.  I was pondering that the other day – there was even an article in the paper that Lego doesn’t make toys with smiles on their faces anymore.  Superheroes don’t laugh – only the supervillains. 

Well, at least my girls aren’t angry – in fact, they are quite happy to be reading and playing music.  They have all been invited to be part of the school musical, Back to the ‘80’s.  I’m not sure we’ve ever left.  Elsa’s got a lead part and I’ll be looking forward to seeing ‘high hair’ back in the house.  Christine was looking back over some of her photos from the ‘80’s and by golly, she had some incredible height on her fringe.  Sky-scraper.  She could have made it rain with that hair.  I’m jealous.

So, my lovely wife is now a year older than I again.  She continues to be awesome.  A steadfast, beautiful, fluid force in my life.  She’s working hard roving between schools as a substitute teacher.  Not an easy gig, but she’s good at it.

4      April

On our way to South Australia.  We’ve been in Tasmania for nine days.  I’m writing this on our last night on the little island.  It’s been incredible to walk by Cradle Mountain, to ‘hang glide’ across a river and cruise the north coast near the ‘Nut.’  I really enjoyed the wombats.  Sometimes I feel like a wombat – always approaching the fine line of perpetual hibernation.  We trod on a wooden walkway and were delighted to see the lumbering beasts walking close enough to us that we could reach down and scratch them.  They grunted with either pleasure, or amusement (maybe even disdain) that we were scratching their backs.  I should try that with Christine – sidle up, grunt a few times, move my hairy back next to her hand and see if she’ll scratch it.

So now we’re finishing up in South Australia at a camp for high school kids called ‘Novo.’  What an incredible experience.  The kids are having a great time, not just running around and playing games, but real-life biblical learning.  The leaders have been excellent; I wish we could have this kind of worship and youth experience every weekend.  There’s something truly invigorating about spiritual renewal.  I’m almost ready to be done with holidays.

5      May

It’s May already.  For some reason I’m surprised, but that’s kind of silly, like waking up one morning and saying, “I can’t believe it’s Wednesday already,” even though for as long as I know, Wednesday has followed Tuesday.  It was good to get back to school, but I think I’m already looking forward to the two weeks off at the end of next month.  The girls are entrenched in the musical and I’m playing in the band.  We haven’t had practices yet, but the girls have been singing ‘Walking on Sunshine’ and I feel as if I’ll pull out the last three hairs on my head if I hear that song again.  I sure hope the voices can keep up with the songs.  “We Are the World” could be a real train wreck, high school voices left strewn all over the adolescent vocal highway.

Weather changes in Australia, not like the extreme swings in the Midwest of the United States, more like the little kiddie swings at the park where you have to strap the infant in so that they don’t fall out.  The seat can only go about four feet off the ground, but for someone who has not experienced that four foot drop, it can be scary, I guess.  Queenslanders have this skewed understanding of what cold is.  The other day a few of the kids were wearing their thick sweaters, coats and long pants.  After they were blowing on their hands, I asked them if it was really that cold.  They assured me that fifteen degrees Celsius is a real ‘shock to the system.’

6      June

Here we are at the halfway point of the year – June 2.  It’s like the half-life of a radioactive substance; it just keeps breaking down halfway at a time.  If you halve the distance between two ends at set periods, theoretically, the end should never get there.  That’s the way this term has felt.  I don’t know why term two is always like that.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been helping to teach religion and ethics this year.  I don’t remember classes to be like this – certainly it probably has to do with the fact that about .5% of the population at school want to talk about religion and even less than that feel a great desire to discuss ethics.  I asked the class three months into the year what the word ‘ethics’ means and I was greeted with the same expression as cows looking up while they chew cud.

Our girls are precariously balancing all their activities whether music (the new piano we have is marvelous which has increased their practice times), musical (I have heard some of the songs now that I’ve been playing with the band – I’ve got nightmarish visions of the end of Dirty Dancing occurring when “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” is being sung) and academics.  Girls are doing great.  Elsa loves her math classes, Josephine has been enjoying legal studies and Greta loves the arts.  All three are really good at German and Elsa is already counting down to when our German exchange student arrives in a few weeks.  Elsa goes to Germany at the end of the year which will be an interesting thing.

7      July

It’s July and I’ve been to Adelaide for pastors’ conference.  Big decisions to be made in October regarding the future of the Lutheran Church of Australia.  James and I stayed in a bed and breakfast in the little town of Hahndorf.  It was strange staying in a quaint, romantic little house with one of my co-pastors.  When he looked at my four poster bed, I think he got a little jealous because he stayed in the ‘pink’ room with the nice curtains surrounding the bed. 

The musical went off with very few hitches other than one of the spotlight boys threw up in the booth causing a good deal of commotion and odor.  Fortunately, there was someone to, ahem, pick up the pieces while the ensemble did their thing on stage.  Elsa sang a solo and was one of the leads while the other two were part of the chorus.  The last night Josephine came down with something akin to laryngitis and couldn’t sing her solo.  So, big sister Elsa, already having heard enough of Josephine’s solo in practice, did a lip sync a la Milli Vanilli, or Blues Traveler.  No one could tell because their voices are so similar.  I wish I could have seen it, but I was busy playing in the band.  We all dressed up in 80’s gear; I pulled out the old high school baseball coat, rolled my jeans and donned a big black wig.  It was nice to have hair again, but very itchy.

Eline has come to stay with us, a very nice young lady from Wiesbaden in Germany.  Her English was fantastic; she enjoyed the sights and sounds of Australia and it seemed that she didn’t really want to go back to Germany yet. 

8     A ugust

Two words.  Elsa… Driving…  The first time I took her out, I’m not quite sure who was more afraid, Elsa or all the cats in the neighborhood.  She did pretty well other than a few issues with braking, accelerating, changing lanes and parking.  Sweet sixteen.  I remember when I was sixteen.  Kind of.  The Berlin Wall was just about to come down and it had been three years since the Mets had won the World Series. 

We celebrated our eighteenth wedding anniversary.  This, too, has been a shock to think that two decades have come and gone since I met the love of my life. 

Now that the musical is done, we’re having difficulties figuring out how to fill our time.  Not.  Someday we’ll soak in the fact that there is such a thing as a ‘weekend,’ which I think means, literally, ‘that there is an end to the work week.’  It seems like volleyball, weddings, church commitments, family outings – all good things – create a nice steady stream for life.

I hope we don’t drown.  Or, if we do, there is some nice person in that crazy little red and yellow hat strapped under their chin (the beach life guards wear these things even while they swim!  It’s awesome; some of the life guards wear these tight florescent pink tank tops.  All the better for the sharks to see them first.), who could perform CPR. 

9      September

Officially – tired.

We finished up the third term at school; the girls are truly on their way to getting great grades and I am seeing how difficult the job of teaching really is.  Christine has been laboriously working at both Peace and Faith (Lutheran Schools) but laboriously working at both of these fruits of the Spirit also.  Peace of mind has come now that we have journeyed to our second home, an apartment right on the beach at Tugun.  There is something completely and wonderfully amazing about standing in the place where the ocean meets the shore, planting your feet there and let the water sculpt the sand around your toes.   For hours, we could listen to the relentless roar of the waves, watch the cloud dapple sky change from brilliant blue, to sparkling orange and enjoy the ocean breeze as we decompress from a school term.  Christine’s family has come for fiftieth birthday parties and are staying just up the beach also.  I have stayed back a couple of times to watch my AFL team lose to the most hated team of all – the Hawthorn Hawks.  Bad umpiring.  It always is.

10 October

After the disappointing decision at the national synod (women’s ordination voted down by fourteen votes – only 64% voted in favor of it) we’ve come back to school and enjoyed the last few weeks of Greta’s confirmation experience.  In some ways, it would have been good to have triplets: confirmation done in two years.  But, we’ve had girls in confirmation since 2010.  It’s not like I want to avoid confirmation, I really like, but it’s good to have the confirmation part done and now they are (hopefully) going to invest their time in service and worship.

It’s been a month into the Fantasy Football Season already.  Christine thinks I’m addicted.  If I were addicted I’d have more than five teams.  My team at school has been a great source of enjoyment and community.  There are lots of things in reality that are as fun as fantasy, but during fantasy football season, it’s harder to see them.  Reality:  Elsa is still driving and the only difficulty she has is an inherited gene from me – straight parking.  Josephine is really enjoying her friendship group and is constantly with them during school breaks.  Often, I am on playground duty.  I volunteer not because I love it, but because I’m checking up on my girls to make sure that the boys are understanding who’s the boss.  Greta has made some good friends and all three are in the chapel bands enjoying the music/worship life of the school.  Well, maybe ‘enjoy’ is a strong word, but they like the comraderie. 

11 November

Ah, like the sweet smell of the spring after the winter snows have melted and the earth is releasing its dormant scent.  The school year is almost finished and what a year it’s been.  The girls have all received academic awards which I take full credit for – well, the credit is for driving them to school.  They’ve done the rest.  But getting them there, that’s a big deal.

On top of academic awards, they received music and athletic awards.  All of the girls have done well – real renaissance women (pronounced in Australia ‘re-nay (accent on ‘nay’)-saunce.’  Australians pronounce all sorts of things differently like ‘shedule – they forget the ‘c’ and even ‘maroon’ pronounced ‘maroan.’  I just go with it.  It’s the beauty of a multicultural family. 

 

We had Christmas this weekend because Elsa is flying out to Germany.  I remember when we flew to Europe for the first time.  It was February and the plane threatened to break apart from the newly acquired polar caps on the wings.  It wasn’t quite as cold this year, but Elsa still took along her winter coat from our last year’s trip to the States.  She’s going to be staying with Eline, the young lady who came to stay with us.  Eventually she’ll spend time at the school, go on a tour of Salzburg (the Sound of Music Tour – Eline’s cousin is named ‘Louisa’.  I wonder if Brigitta will be there too?) and a skiing adventure into the Italian Alps.  I guess they call this an ‘educational’ experience.  She’ll have a great time. 

12 December

It’s New Year’s Eve. 

We have been watching movies, playing games and desperately trying to stay awake for the last couple of hours.  It’s 10:00.

We’ve had a whirlwind adventure of a December.  Not only did school finish well, but we’ve had multiple opportunities to sing Christmas carols and revel in the Christmas spirit.  Enough of this bah-humbug-there’s-no-such-thing-as-joy-to-the-world.  We’ve reveled in traveling to Melbourne to visit Christine’s brother, cousin and aunt.  I’ve petted more dogs in those ten days than I have since I was growing up.  The highlights – a yacht experience with friends of Russell’s who took us out into the bay.  It was a little rough, but the girls stood at the front of the boat on the (jeesh, I wish I was a sailor) pointy thing sticking out from the bow and rode it like a roller coaster.  We went on an old steam train called the Puffing Billy.  I naively thought that because Australians make up names for all sorts of things, that a ‘billy’ was another word for a train.  But it’s not – they just called it a billy.  A billy can mean a multitude of other things include a can in which you heat water, a goat, a place that is far far away (to billy-o) and I’m sure other things that I have not yet encountered.  It was great to spend time with family and friends. 

 

I was able to talk with some of my family by skype today – they look happy and healthy and wise.  I am grateful to God for this year and for all the adventures with which we have been blessed.  I’m raising a toast with the new wine which I bought for my Christmas present – Happy New Year to all!