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Katie Funk Wiebe shares year-end thoughts with good friends:
Have you got five minutes for a little chat with me? Make a cup of tea and pull up a chair. Here's my Christmas greeting to you. Maybe it's not the usual report on family members, but rather a report on my own growth as I grow older. I am grateful for a good measure of health, love of life, and ministry opportunities. As my mother said when she was over 90, "Life is still sweet."
- I've learned that items like key chains, ball point pens, and paper clips multiply by cell division when left in a dark corner of a drawer for any length of time. Before you know it, you've got enough to supply the neighborhood. On the other hand friends only multiply if you declare open season on them openly, all the time.
- It continues to amaze me how many words speakers can use to say nothing, especially during an election year. If we were each given an allotment of words to use each year, how many of them would count?
- I have a notepad that measures 5 x 3/4 inches. I call it my notepad for narrow-minded people. Some days I use it myself because it fits my thinking that day. Other days I wish I had a couple of dozen to hand out to everyone I meet.
- An old-timer is someone who can remember when you couldn't eat a dollar's worth at a café, when people were more intelligent than computers, when any man who washed dishes worked in a restaurant.
- You make life meaningful for yourself when you bring meaning to someone else's life by simple acts of love. MEANING in capital letters doesn't come pounding on your door demanding to be let in. You have to go beyond yourself to find it and bring it in.
- FEAR often rides shotgun beside me whenever I encounter a new aspect of aging. I see it also in the older woman who states loudly in a restaurant, "I am not going to pay extra for that mistake the waiter made," or in myself when I am asked to do something I've never done before.
- It takes a lot of heat — and strength and creativity — to make a blown-glass figurine or vase. I saw this at the Karg Glassworks as we watched the men take big blobs of molten glass out of extremely hot furnaces and turn them into breathtakingly beautiful vases. I ponder how much heat God still needs to turn me into a work of beauty to be proud of.
- Oswald Chambers tells me that to turn the natural and physical into the spiritual takes sacrifice. Sacrifice? What's that? That is a concept many people dropped during the thirties when sacrificial giving took the giver to the bottom of the purse.
- I still enjoy new challenges, any kind, even while I resist them. Some people have the idea that as you get older all you want is to be entertained or travel and go to socials. The challenge of being confronted with rethinking my attitudes and theology is sometimes painful, but always a spurt in personal growth. And then a joy.
- Christmas is a wonderful time because it draws people together and hopefully also closer to the Christ, the reason for the season. And that is why I am drawing close to you in this letter.
Love to all,
Mother, grandmother, sister, friend
Jay L. Roth, Mennonite Association for Retired Persons
23 Homestead Drive, Lancaster, PA 17602
717-201-8391 ~ E-mail
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