COFFEE BREAK 104

+ Updated at 4:35pm EST.

+ 4:30pm: The snow continues to fall exceeding expectations of the forecasters. A narrow band of Lake-effect snow is hitting us directly right now. We may have several inches before it's over.

+ I'm working on a sermon for Christmas Eve. I came across
"Christmas: Andy Parks DOES Keep It All The Year!" at a blog called Joy of Christmas: “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” 

I have decided to emphasize joy tomorrow night. Spirituality and Practice offers all kinds of ways to develop the spiritual practice of Joy. There is a page devoted to joy at abundancetrek.com.

+ 1:45pm: For most of the past 3 hours, the band of Lake-effect snow has reached us and perhaps another inch has fallen.

+ Rick Steves, the wonderful Travel guide, offers a Norwegian Christmas page.  Like me, Rick has Norwegian grandparents on one side of his family.  My grandparents, Samuel & Ingeborg, grew up in Mandal, a beautiful coastal town and the southernmost town in Norway.  They immigrated here in 1901 and 1904.  My mother was born in New York City in 1906.

+ As Christmas approaches, The Witherspoon Society offers an insightful poem and a powerful prayer for peace.

+ At 10:25am, patches of blue appear in the sky and the snow comes to an end with most of the grass covered up with the white stuff.

+ The Abundancetrek Blog offers several posts on The Copenhagen Conference on Global Warming which concluded last week with some agreements but not nearly as much as many had hoped for.

+ Inner Frontier offers "Body Sensation: Wholeness" by Joseph Naft. Excerpt: "To come to whole body sensation, it helps to practice partial sensation first: an arm, a leg, both arms and both legs, and then the whole body. The practice of energy breathing, of drawing inner energies from the air around us, strengthens sensation throughout our body. That can be done intermittently throughout the day to refresh our sensation body. The end result: we experience ourselves to be more fully here." 

+ Spirituality and Practice offers "The Most Spiritually Literate Films of 2009" by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat.  How many have you seen?  Thanks to the DVD we will see many of those we haven't seen yet as I put these films on my Netflix queue.

+ Blades of grass can still be seen but an inch of snow overnight has made a difference.  We may get a little more today so we will definitely have a White Christmas here.