Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

christmas

Saturday smiles: Change is good edition

I was thinking of Sheryl Crow when we rearranged our living room yesterday.

“A change, a change, would do you good.”

Now, you’re singing it, too, right?

Even though we’re anticipating a move in what we hope is the near future, we decided to move our furniture around, clean and pack up living room stuff before decorating for Christmas. My thinking is that we won’t have to get the stuff back out that we packed up. Might be wishful thinking.

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Anyway, the change has done a lot of good for me mentally. We’re still in the same house with the same problems, with too much stuff and too little space, but I’m refreshed by the new look. A little change with a big mental impact for me.

This week was full of changes for us. Our son turned 3 on Sunday. And we are now fully engulfed in the preschool years. I can’t call either of my kids babies or toddlers anymore. They are little human beings now. (I mean, they were always human but now they’re more like small adults.)

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As I write this, our daughter, 4 1/2, is teaching her brother about how babies are born while they play with their Little People nativity set. I guess it’s time to start talking about where babies come from!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAShe’s also drawing pictures that look like things now. She drew this for me yesterday. I’m pretty sure it’s her and not me.

Two days this week I got to leave the house. (Did you here the “Hallelujah!” where you are?) By myself. Without kids. For large chunks of time. Grandparents were in town, so twice I accompanied my husband to Lancaster, where he works, and spent the day doing whatever I wanted. One day, I hung out at Panera and Barnes and Noble, reading and writing. Then we all ate together at Chick-Fil-A as a family. Then my husband and I got a mini-date night at a coffeehouse. The next day, I got to spend hours catching up with a friend. Both days it was fun to ride with my husband and just be together. And to order a drink from him at his place of work and sit and read while waiting for his shift to end. So refreshing. A taste of what may come when the kids start school, if I’m not working a job myself.

More highlights from this week:

The 3-year-old and his orange shades. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Yep, it’s bedtime and he’s wearing them while brushing his teeth. When I asked him what he wanted Santa to bring him, he said, “Orange glasses. Because I only just have my orange shades.” Mark my words: He’s going to choose a college based on their colors, and if orange isn’t one of them, no deal.

The girl and her brain. On a day when they watched Super Why, Sid the Science Kid and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, I asked which one she liked the best. (I’m personally fond of Super Why, and Sid is growing on me.) She said, “You know how much I like Sid? 12 plus 14 plus 1.” Huh? Oh, well. Math skills, here we come!

And a box of love landed on our door Friday. We always love boxes of love, especially though, when they are filled with such awesomeness as:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA pirate eye patches (new house rule: one pirate eye patch per person at meal times)

Ugandan coffee

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAfun cups and bowls

Lush bath product

and clothes for the kids, including some cool winter coats that the kids wore out of the house 30 minutes after we opened the box. Life isn’t about stuff, but it’s the love behind the stuff that we love.

That’s my favorite part of Christmas: not the getting of stuff or the giving of stuff but the showing of love in ways you can see and touch and hold and use.

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Smilin’ today. Now if only I could find an extension cord so I can light the Christmas tree!

An inspiring holiday read: Review of Unexpected Christmas Hero by Kathi Macias

Holidays are not “happy” for everyone, and this is something I too easily forget.

Kathi Macias tackles a realistic aspect of holidays–homelessness–in her latest Christmas novel Unexpected Christmas Hero. This is not a feel-good Christmas story, at least not to start. I found it hard to read at first. The main character, Josie, is a mom with two young children who finds herself unexpectedly homeless because of some poor financial decisions her late husband made before his death. In a year’s time, she went from living the “American dream” and enjoying a robust Thanksgiving to scrounging for a warm, dry place to sleep for a night and eating a Thanksgiving meal in a shelter. Her struggles, fears and survival tactics are so realistic, I was stressed reading about her journey. I was also convicted about how little I think of others on those holidays and humbled by how casually I’ve treated the blessings in my life.

The young family meets Rick, a homeless veteran, who crosses their path many times and helps them when he can. The supporting characters in Unexpected Christmas Hero do the sorts of things I would hope every caring person would think of: taking people into their homes, sharing meals, offering rides, volunteering at homeless shelters.

Macias’s stories almost always leave me feeling uncomfortable in a good way and challenged in my beliefs and actions.

Watch the book trailer below, then read on as Kathi talks with Christian Speakers Services about the book and the “story behind the story” about the man pictured on the book’s front cover.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/VCHDr4wMqT4]

Homelessness is a tough topic for Christmas. What inspired you to use that as the basis for your annual Christmas novel?
I’ve been involved in homeless ministries, to one degree or another, for decades, so I’m not new to this area of ministry. But I’ll admit that I had never considered writing a novel about it until someone in my family, who had personally experienced homelessness at one time in his life, suggested it. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed the perfect theme for a Christmas novel. After all, at Christmas we celebrate the birth of our Savior, who was pretty much homeless at that particular point in time and was born in a stable because there was no room for them at the Bethlehem Motel 6.
Despite having previous ministry and even personal experience with the homeless, were there still some difficult times for you as you researched and wrote this novel?
Absolutely! I always try to climb inside the skin of my characters, and when I thought of myself as the young mother Josie, attempting to care for and protect her two small children while living on the streets, I wept. There were times when my own children were little that we didn’t have a lot of material things and almost never had enough money at the end of the month, but we always had a roof over our heads and never wondered where we would find our next meal. When I consider that approximately 25 percent of the homeless in America are families (either single or dual-parent) with small children, it breaks my heart.
Can you give us a brief synopsis of Unexpected Christmas Hero?
This is a story about a young family—husband, wife, two small children—who seem to be living the American dream. But when the husband dies unexpectedly, the wife (Josie) not only has to deal with that loss but quickly discovers that they are destitute. Her husband had lost his job some months earlier but didn’t want to worry her, so he hid it from her, hoping to find another position. He didn’t, and eventually ran up all their credit cards, took out a second mortgage on the house, emptied their savings, and even cashed in his life insurance policy. It doesn’t take long until Josie and her children lose their home and find themselves living on the streets, depending on the charity of others to survive. Then they meet Rick, a homeless Vietnam vet who takes them under his wing and, in a most surprising and sacrificial way, becomes their unexpected Christmas hero.
Tell us about the “story behind the story,” which involves the man on the front cover.
When the publisher sent the designer out to find someone to pose as Rick, the homeless vet in the book, he spotted a man on the street who looked amazingly like him. He asked the man—whose name is Willard Parker—if he would pose for the book cover. The man readily agreed and then explained that he truly was homeless and hoped having his picture on the cover would somehow help him find his family, particularly his grown daughter. We are doing our best to stay in touch with Mr. Parker and also to spread his story across the Internet and on radio/TV in hopes of fulfilling his dream to be reunited with his family. If anyone looks at the picture on the cover and/or recognizes the man’s name (Willard Parker) and knows the whereabouts of any of his family, we would truly appreciate it if they would contact me at ezyrtr@ca.rr.com so we can take the necessary steps to try and make this reunion happen.
Where can people find your book?
It’s available on any of the main online venues (Amazon, ChristianBooks.com, Barnes & Noble, etc.) and many stores nationwide.
Can you give us your website info?
Sure! You can find me at www.kathimacias.com or www.boldfiction.com. I’d love it if people would stop by there and check out all my books, as well as the video trailers that go with them. They can also sign up to receive my weekly devotional, or check out where I’ll be speaking in the near future. Above all, click on “contact” and send me an email. I’d love to hear from them, and I promise to answer.
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I was given a complimentary copy of this book from the author in  exchange for posting the author’s interview and/or book review on my  blog. CSS Virtual Book Tours are managed by Christian Speakers Services (http://ChristianSpeakersServices.com).