Gentle Reader,
What do you need today?
If you don’t know how to answer that question, you’re not alone.
I’m always tired. That’s part of living with a chronic illness. If there is space in my day for a nap, you better believe I’m curling up on the couch. If we have guests, they have to leave by 9:00 p.m. or, if they want to stay later, they have to be fine with locking the door behind them because I’m going to bed. I’m actually not sure how I ever successfully participated in youth group all niters, because now the very idea makes me want to cry.
Tired is my normal. I thought I understood tired. The last six months have shown me I was wrong. There are new, deeper levels of tired. The kind of tired you enter into when a loved one has cancer or there is no resolution to, no redemption of, a relationship. A different sort of tired that always pulling at your heels as you do your best to embrace the good and the joyful in each day. And there has been much good and much joy in these months, even on the hardest days.
But the tired doesn’t go away.
Advent begins on Sunday, and with it a new year in the life of the Church. We will spend the next four weeks contemplating the wonder of the Incarnation, of God in flesh-and-blood, of Jesus Christ come to earth. We confess that we are tired. We traverse valleys of sorrow that affect us so deeply that the tears fall only in the depths of our souls, where the Divine alone witnesses them. Before we get to the celebration of Christmas (which is 12 days long, ending on Epiphany in January), we come face-to-face with our own longing.
With our own need.
I think it’s okay if you don’t know exactly what it is that you need today. Maybe just admitting that you do need is enough.
Perhaps that acknowledgement opens the door for God, who knows us better than we know ourselves.
Yes, the manger signals something about this baby, but it is not simply his poverty. By being placed in the manger, he is revealed as both the rightful son of Adam charged with caring for his creation and also the eternal Son of God who created them and who provides for them. So instead of filling the manger with hay or corn, he fills it with himself.
– Hannah Anderson, Heaven and Nature Sing, p. 80
GRACE AND PEACE ALONG THE WAY,
MARIE
Image Courtesy of Engin Akyurt