Dawn

What happens when what you were expecting starts to happen? What do you do when the baby in the manger starts to cry? When the friendship you prayed would grow finally buds? When the student walks across a stage and becomes a graduate? What is next when what you have been waiting for starts to formulate and blossom?

I think the human (and initial) reaction is to forget that you were ever anticipating a change to begin with– to passively accept the change and move on. The second reaction is to be afraid and cling to what you know.

What if we are called to shed the older versions of ourselves without forgetting who we were?

In this season of advent, I am reminded of my Christian roots. I am sick of living apart from the truth I proclaim. I normally celebrate advent but have never before observed it. It has been a choice to dig deeper this year and to put the Christ story to work in my own life– in the good and the bad. There is so much death, despair and pure heartbreak happening around me and part of this longing for something more has come from the grieving alongside others and in the begging for hope and peace in their lives.

ad·vent (n): the arrival of a notable person, thing, or event.

Advent is a season to recognize the past, identify the need for change in the now and accept the journey into the next. While still in the first week of advent, my identity as a follower of Christ has been questioned and my morals, beliefs and thoughts shaken and disturbed.

My uncle, Stephen W. Smith, recently shared on Facebook that starting a new year and a new season involves “giving up notions of God and accepting a God one still can’t comprehend or manipulate.” Isn’t the same true with relationships, events and circumstances? Isn’t the idea behind advent applicable in all areas of life and shouldn’t it mean more than just a perfect family standing in front of a pulpit on Sunday to light a candle? I want this season to resonate this year and not fade when the candle is blown out.

In the midst of the change we ask and pray for, we have to remember to release the old and accept the next chapter, the fresh gift from God. But the grip to let go of the old and embrace the new involves close soul care, similar to that of pruning a young tree.

“Some tables of mine are being upturned. Some ideas and illusions are being turned over.”

My uncle, decades my senior, captures my own thoughts better than I.

“Advent is for me, a season of purgation–a season of deep inner cleansing–a time of anticipation and in most every way, a time to envision a future that I need and desperately long for right now.”

I spend so much of my time thinking that the promise of the “next” will never fully develop. Richard Rohr, a profound yet humble Christian author, explains the harm done when we minimize the potential of the promises in our lives and when we ignore the growth that should be changing us:

We do the Gospel no favor when we make Jesus, the Eternal Christ, into a perpetual baby, a baby able to ask little or no adult response from us. One even wonders what the mind is that would keep Jesus a baby. Maybe it was “baby Christianity.”

Am I asking for things in faith but unable to fully accept their arrival? Am I too weak to be challenged by what I am called to face? Jesus comes as a baby first, yes, but he also grows into a man and a leader. Our hopes, dreams, thoughts and aspirations must start at some infantile stage, but we must not fear their development into mature and fulfilled realities, nor hinder their ability to grow.

C.S. Lewis struggled with the same thing.

“Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Joy is what waits on the other side. The other side of this mound, this pile of bile, that no longer smells to the one wading in it. I do not want to be satisfied in the slums of my soul.

This season of advent is not a season of guilt, shame or fear. I pray it is a season of light, change and renewal. The road to get there from the slums we have accepted as home is attainable. Joy, peace, hope and love is extended and the offer stands.

But where to start?

The better questions is, when? A synonym for advent is “dawn”– start then.