When I was young, my parents always loaded up the car with luggage and presents, food and drink, kids and dogs for our annual Christmas trip to Cambridge, Nebraska, where my mother’s parents, George and Babe Scott lived. In the earlier years, we spent Christmas on the family farm ten miles or so north of town. When Grandma and Grandpa retired from the farm, we spent it in Cambridge. Either way, my earliest memories of Christmas were there.
One memory really stands out this year. It was Christmas Eve and I was maybe five years old. My sister Kathy and I were in the guest bedroom upstairs in the old farm house (which was unheated). Kathy was in a crib and I in a small bed beside her. There was another bed in room for mom and dad, but they were downstairs playing pinochle (and waiting for us to go to sleep so they could finalize things for Christmas morning).
I was wide awake — excited for Santa. As I lay under the quilts, I could see the night sky through the bedroom window. Now and then, I saw a red light moving across the sky. Could it be him? Will he come if I am still awake? As I began to drift off to sleep, I thought I heard sleigh bells, and jumped up to look out the window. But what I saw was another face staring back at me. I panicked, screamed, and bolted out of the room and down the stairs. My poor younger sister, startled by my actions, was stuck in the crib, crying and screaming herself.
Turns out, the creature I had seen in the window was my own reflection. I was so intent on seeing something else — someone else — that I wasn’t able to recognize the truth that stared back at me.
Of course, I was only five years old when this happened. But it is a reminder, for me, that we all can become so intent on an anticipated future that when the present shows up, we often don’t recognize the truth of the now which we are faced with.
As we enter Advent together, we might be tempted to move right into secular celebrations of Christmas and, especially, the hustling bustling obligations, and challenges, they bring. We might also find ourselves trying to make sense of the changes that will be happening in the future — at the nation’s capitol, with the global financial market, with the balance of military power across the world, on our borders and in our city streets, with the cost of living and challenges of health.
Perhaps Advent can be a time for us to sit in the now… keeping an eye on the future but savoring and welcoming the present as it unfolds in our very presence. Anticipating not the things we fear or which concern us, but the promise of God which manifests itself in a helpless baby born on a silent night. Anticipating that when we look into the darkened glass of our own present we will see the face of God welcoming us, beckoning us, calming and centering us.
May our Advent be a time to hand our fears and concerns, our busy-ness and anxieties, over to the gift of God always coming, always calming, always present to us.
Advent Pax,
Pastor Scott