The Season We Make Peace
The Season We Make Peace
Our Father and the Work of Our Hands
Lindianne Sappington, Christmas Day, 2024
Baker County dried apples, the work of our hands in 2024. Arthur pruned the fruit trees, I mulched the fruit trees, God watered the fruit trees with an abundant snowfall that our foresters wisely captured in our well-managed high desert watershed. My hands washed and sliced the fruit, arranged pieces on the dehydrator tray, tested for doneness, stored in a clean glass jar. For our Christmas Meat Loaf, I sauteed in coconut oil dried apples with onion and olive mixed with ground venison, egg, bread crumbs and salt to bake with potatoes.
As my hands move through humble kitchen tasks, I speak to Creator in my heart. I thank Creator for my husband, our home, our community, our watershed, Nature Who Feeds Us, the preserved food in our larder. I radiate love for our children in Baker County, Oregon and in Uganda, Africa.
Who designed and created our hands? Who designed and created the land that sustains us? Our Creator. Our Father. The Unity at the heart of the universe, who thought, designed and created an unimaginably vast living being, the universe. Our Father, who lives forever in Paradise at the pumping heart of His universe. Our Father created us warm-hearted creatures who walk upright on His worlds of time and space. Our Father designed us to carry a Father Fragment of His Unity within ourselves. He dwells within us and so he knows our hearts, our thoughts, our acts, our intent.
The Father Fragment arrives within as soon as a child chooses between good and evil. From that moment each human of free will dignity answers the question, what shall I do with my free will choice?
Let us pray! Father, what shall we do with our hands and resources for our family, our community, our nation, and for humanity? How shall we preserve and pass on the gifts we receive in our kitchens and in our hearts? We pour out our worship, our love, our voices! Thank you, Father, for these local foods, foundation of our vitality and health. Thank you for this local culture, for our cows, our songs, our music, our foods.
I crocheted this Christmas Shawl in between calls to friends to give a Christmas feast to the children of Our Grace Children’s Home, who eat meat once a year. And our community came through! You gave the occasion for beautiful smiles and joyful grateful hearts. And this shawl blazed into beauty, fruit of my joy and gratitude.
For now is the time I have been singing about since 2003:
The Season We Make Peace
In 2003 I wrote this song, Christmas of ’03. The Iraq War had started, and I wrote,
Christmas of ’03, Christmas of ’03
The world is crying out for peace
Children are hungry, children are afraid,
Children lost, lonely and unfree.
Christmas of ’03! When will Christmas be
The season we make peace?
When we stand up for what we believe!
We are the families of the earth
and we believe in Love!
Jesus is our brother,
Moses is our wanderer,
Mohammed is our prophet of peace.
We all walk upon our Mother, upon her fields of green,
We sail her oceans blue to the harvest of our dreams.
She can feed us all, from desert to north pole,
Garden without end is she!
And then I sang it every Christmas, asking, will this Christmas be the season we make peace?
Folks, I believe this is the year. 76 million American voters and our families gave our government to a movement dedicated to restoring our constitutional republic. A brilliant young team is forming. Americans are looking forward in hope, not backward in anger at the mess left for us to clean up. We are Americans, so we roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Out here in rural America, we already live an agrarian life, with our hay, our cattle, our orchards and vines, our root crops of onion and carrot and potato. Our American constitution is rooted in an agrarian society; 95% of us were farmers when we the people decided to govern ourselves as one nation under God. Our founding document is our Constitution. Many are the souls who gave their sacred oath to defend our Constitution—an oath that never expires. My husband at 74 years defends the Constitution as valiantly as he did in the Coast Guard 50+ years ago. Food sovereignty is our aim! We are agrarian, populist, and devout. And pictured here are the counties we won! Merry Christmas!
