It was an awesome way to slow down the huge rush to run through the season. You can't fly through life when you can't get on line. You can't drown out the whisper of God when there is no sound to distract, no lights, no buzz, no clatter. Cereal for breakfast. Sandwiches for lunch. Blankets and books. I took a nap. The power came back on, but the result? Four kids are watching the old Sound of Music, three are making cookies, two are outside sledding.
Advent requires deliberate action, deliberate wakefulness to the heavenly song as versus the jingle the world cranks out every year this time. Here's a great article discussing it with ideas on how to deliberately rebel. Read it, and then read the link it links to as well.
Then, seek out the softer part of Christmas. Write cards. Light candles. Bake cookies. Sing. Cultivate deliberate loveliness in a cold dark world. Drink deep the joy of the day when it is offered, for it may not come again. (My son just invited me outside to sled and while I hate cold, I just wrote those words so...I'll be finding my socks and warm coat).
In the meantime, enjoy this piece of Christmas awesomeness:
and consider, the goal of our lives is to be like Fred in the Christmas carol to all other wounded souls.
There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say, Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round - apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that - as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!
Then, I'm going to go eat some gingerbread and hot cocoa with the kids. Blessed Advent.
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