Simple, obvious, often overlooked or underestimated. Can this wisdom ever be more true than during Advent? For every household that fills these days with Christmas carols and the smell of baking, there is a family where the pain of loss still hangs so heavily that everything seems to be in slow motion. For each ad enticing us to consumption that reaches our mailbox or inbox, there is a village thousands of miles away where a mother is figuring out how to stretch 3 days of food rations to feed a family for a week or more. Advent under the tree at Rockefeller Center feels distinctly different than another December spent in a prison yard in Texas.
“Never forget that people are different.”
Advent offers a way through this. It offers a way with all these differences. Advent discipline – the quiet, the watching, the waiting – leads to joy. But it is a joy that is rooted in humility and in a sense of expectation that we cannot create that joy on our own. Sometimes the frenzy and busyness of this month seems to create the myth that if we work hard enough, shop long enough, bake diligently enough, we can create the joy we so desperately want.
“Never forget that people are different.”
If this Advent finds you in harmony with your life, thank God. If this Advent finds you disrupted or even shattered by where you find yourself right now, you too can thank God. The thanksgiving for the harmony is gratitude for a God who fulfills promises. The thanksgiving for the disruption is a greater challenge, but it is the gratitude that a God whose love was borne out on the cross will go to any length and plunge to any depth to give us a hope that will not fail us, even in the hardest times.
How intriguing to juxtapose "people are different" with "people are the same."
ReplyDeleteI like the sense of "different" in that one never knows all the different circumstances people are facing in their lives. I also like though, the sense that none of us are "special" or are going through anything that another one of us hasn't gone through as well. That we can be bound to each other in a "sameness" that might just let us lower our guard and find community.
I am grateful for the "God whose love was borne out on the cross" and will "plunge to any depth to give us a hope." I find sometimes, that the face of this Christ is in another broken soul, whose "sameness" and honesty with me gives me contact and community in my own depths of Sheol.
Maybe a different sense of Advent -- awaiting the Christ who is speaking to me even now through people like me. . .
Peace.