Advent: A Beautiful Time Of Failure

It’s Advent. Yay! I know you are all super happy, as I am, and not stressed at all. Yesterday I sat in my comfy beautiful new desk chair, in which, when I sit down, my feet touch the floor and my back doesn’t develop a slow irritating ache, and rewrote all my lists. Earlier I had carefully poured tea over the originals and so it was either rewrite them or feel out of control for the next four weeks.

So, it’s Advent! And that, besides candles, means St, Nicholas day. I wrote a little something for Amy over at the Celebration Project. I think you’ll enjoy her blog, lots of good church year ideas, achievable ideas. That’s the key. After writing something nice and well, just go read it, I fell into my usual wandering around the wasteland of Binghamton looking for stuff to put in children’s shoes. It culminated in me muscling my way through the checkout at Wegmans, plunking six chocolate bears (so sue me, the santas were just too Santa this year) and six packets of blank index cards onto the whatchamacallit, and the checkout lady saying kindly, “Do you mind if I ask? What are you going to do with six packs of index cards?”

“Oh, ah,” I said fretfully, “it’s coming on St. Nicholas day, and I couldn’t find beautiful little notebooks, so it’s going to have to be index cards. I hope they fit in the shoes, ” I said, and I could see that she was sorry she asked. So I have the index cards, and little sets of pencils in tins, and little tubs of clay, and marbles. Because I hate myself.

And I did remember to gather purple candles and dig out my lost advent wreath, a real one, with beautiful carvings along the bottom,

And we forced the children to sit down and listen to a small portion of the Bible and sing O Come O Come Emmanuel.

And then when Alouicious asked if he could paint his big letter, in the same manner of asking that had been driving me crazy all day, the sort of plaintive, injured ask, as if nothing good ever comes to him and all the food and shelter and love count for nothing because he hasn’t been able to paint his big letter, I lost it and told him how it was. Which is my first failure of Advent, because I was going to give up yelling.

I don’t usually give anything up in this season. But I felt, last week, some sort of inkling that some pentitence of mind and heart for me is in order, and that much of the time my children must see me as a raving lunatic, so I thought I might try to, you know, not yell quite so much. So I resolved not to yell, and then I went ahead and did it anyway. But that is the reason for the season. I am very far gone. I cannot rescue myself. I need the one who has the power not to yell to come and save me, which he did two thousand years ago and does every day when I cry out to him.

Have a lovely day!

Advent: a beautiful time of failure