SoulPerSuit Contemplative Christmas Week 1

*A note before you read this. After doing an audit of my blog in 2022, I have decided to leave content that speaks to the Christian I was at the time this was written. I no longer identify as Christian (and haven’t for a very long time.) I chose to leave these posts because it is who I was then and it is important to me to be honest and true with every iteration and evolution of self that I experience. I may decide to add comments to the end of posts like this as well

Little did I know when I decided to participate in SoulPerSuit’s Contemplative Christmas series that the first theme would be Barn Smells and that I’d be staying in a barn that very week.

I’ve not spent much time in a barn, not like my husband, Phil, has. He was raised on a farm, put up hay every summer while his eyes swelled shut from hayfever…we celebrated our tenth anniversary together at the Rawhide Ranch, a dude ranch with an 11 room bunkhouse built over the 32 stall horse stable below.

We walked in, smelled the hay, put our bags down and went straight to the pharmacy for Benedryl, Claritin, and Afrin nose spray to ease my poor husband’s allergies.

And I thought about the theme of barn smells. It wasn’t the animal smells or the dirt or moisture, it was the hay that did my husband in. Such a small little oversight in my planning could have made our whole anniversary trip a disaster without allergy meds. Thank you Lord, for not overlooking the details, not forgetting.

I don’t think Christ being born in a barn was a bad thing, I’ve never thought that. As I get older, I realize that all of this is more than I can comprehend.