Advent Is Not An Emergency

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The first week of December often flies by with excitement fueling each activity and when the second week arrives it can feel like time is too short, the lists of things still left to accomplish too long, and we can all forget an important element in Advent: soft remembrance. 

In Glad and Golden Hours, Lanier Ivester introduces us to the second week of Advent with a reminder that was once shared with her: Christmas is not an emergency. We don’t have to rush. We can slow down, embrace the small moments, and remember what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

Experiences are wonderful, but they are meaningless if we can’t pause and enjoy them. Beauty is grace, but it’s lost if we don’t breathe it in.

I often tell the story of my favorite Christmas as a child. It was 1995 and my mother had been diagnosed with cancer that fall. It was treatable by surgery, so as the holiday season arrived, all my parent’s money and resources and energy went into getting my mother well. Her surgery happened right around Thanksgiving and we entered Advent with her in recovery.

All the things my mother usually did for the holidays didn’t happen. There was no holiday bustling about—instead, there was quiet as she recovered on the living room couch, and we brought her drinks and combed her hair or rubbed her feet. 

But then one evening she was feeling well enough to go out for a little while and all of us children were left at home. I don’t know whose idea it was but the next thing all of us were pulling out the Christmas decorations and hanging them up in excitement. We were going to surprise mom with a fully decorated home. 

I know now how deeply she probably cringed when she saw the huge clumps of tinsel on the tree. She always carefully applied the tinsel, a single strand at a time. But not her sons. They covered the tree with silver globs. 

But we didn’t know that then. All we knew was that mom hugged us and told us thank you, that the house was lovely. 

When Christmas day rolled around, there weren’t piles of presents under the tree. Papa just told us, quietly but firmly, that mama was our gift that year. She was alive and well, cancer-free, and what a gift to each of us. 

I don’t know how that Christmas felt to each person, but to me? It was soft and lovely. Slow, with little sprouts of joy, like the night we decorated and the morning we all hugged our mama, and the moments we were told to hunt in the tree for the four tiny gifts that we did have, sent by someone who felt led to mail our family a small package of presents. Mine was a box of hair ties. Spotting it in the branches, pulling off the wrapping paper, smiling at the colored bands—it was as precious to me as if I’d unwrapped a string of priceless pearls. 

How is it with my soul? 

In week two of Glad and Golden Hours, Lanier asks a question—How is it with my soul? And this is the question of Advent, isn’t it? As we stride forward through the weeks of December, nearing ever closer to the time of remembering the arrival of Emmanuel, how is it with our souls? Are we present? Are we breathing deep and remembering how God came to be with us? To walk beside us, in reach of our hands as we grope our way through life? Are we, as Lanier says, willing to give God the “loaves and fishes of our ordinary days” that He might use what we’ve offered to feed the world hope and light and love? That He might feed us through the quiet, gentle miracle of remembering?

The bustle and excitement of the season is a joy and worth embracing and delighting in, but we can’t forget that forced pauses can be as precious as the most brilliant Christmas celebration. Like the Christmas I experienced with few traditions followed and just a tiny present for each child which somehow became my most cherished childhood memory—the limitations of our humanity can become the moments when the hope of Christmas comes slipping into our lives. 

The Hope That is Advent

So as our second week of Advent moves forward, may we all take a deep breath and softly remember the reason we are looking ahead to with anticipation. It’s not to accomplish anything, but to rejoice in what was accomplished for us. 

While we bake Christmas cookies with our little ones, or bake Christmas cookies while longing for little ones, or surrender to the reality that we can’t bake Christmas cookies at all this year—

While we make Christmas candy that sets perfectly, or we make Christmas candy that dissolves into a pile of gooey sugar, or we acknowledge that making Christmas candy will have no place in our holiday preparations—

While we decorate our homes with all the beautiful aesthetic things, or allow our children to fill our home with tinfoil and crumbled paper decorations, or lay to rest any hope for decorations to grace our home at all—

While we create or bake or design, or while we lay back and recover from sickness or loss, or while we try and survive through a season of hardship that pushes any celebrating to the backburner of our lives—

Through all of these things and all of the other things that affect and stir up our lives, may we softly remember the hope that is Advent: 

Emmanuel came to be with us—in sickness and in health, in beauty and in sorrow, in richness and in poverty, in delight and in mourning. 

We need never be alone. We’ve been chosen and we belong. He is right here in every situation and every experience.

Noel, Noel, the King has come. 
May heaven and nature sing—
and may our hearts be ever tuned to His presence. 
Amen and Amen.

Photography: JenniMarie Photography