Advent: week three
December 14, 2015 § 3 Comments
It hardly feels like Christmastime here in Dallas. I’m sitting outside under the leafy oak tree, sunlight dappling the green lawn, birds chirping in the limbs overhead. Earlier, I jogged around the block, enjoying the 70 degree weather in my T-shirt and running shorts.
Though it’s hardly Christmas-like, I am glad for the warmth. There is something sweet in weather like this, something that makes me rather nostalgic for summers in high school, for the excitement of driving down a rarely trodden dirt road, for the pleasure of climbing a hefty low-limbed tree.
This weather is making me feel good, making me feel something rather like joy, something rather like hope.
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And of course, hope is at the heart of Advent.
But hope isn’t always so easy to come by, and the thing we have hope in during Advent (namely, that the eternal and everlasting being we call God tucked Himself into the tiny and temporal being of a baby) often seems silly at best and downright mad at worst.
This weather, though, it’s making me look at hope through new eyes. It’s making me pause and wonder, what if?
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What if the eternal and everlasting being we call God tucked Himself into the tiny and temporal being of a baby?
And what if He did that so that He could grow up and die?
And what if, in dying, He turned back the clocks, unfolded the sheets of time, threw back the stars in their galaxies?
What if He’s doing that in us now, clawing away our crusty exteriors, breathing fresh air into the dark holes of our being, filling us up with honey and wine?
What if we stepped back from our expectations of what the world is and will be and always has been, and thought, maybe God came to Earth as a little baby?
What if we dared to hope, dared to look around for God, dared to see Him, if just for one brief instant, here in the sunshine of a balmy winter’s day, here, on Earth?
It’s warm and rainy in DC. Very unseasonable. Expect a very cold and snowy new year!
Great line “What if the eternal and everlasting being we call God tucked Himself into the tiny and temporal being of a baby?”
It was fun meeting you tonight and I look forward to reading more of your work!
Thanks, Obinna! It was great meeting you too! Hope to cross paths again soon.