In Which I am Basically Grateful about 2015

I am slowly being sucked into an Internet sinkhole of Star Wars reading which I will momentarily suspend to acknowledge that this appears to be the last day of the year. How it seems to have crept up on me. I was carrying along merrily, sitting upon my crumb encrusted chair, sipping eggnog, watching the children watch six separate movies on their six separate kindle fires, causing my aching finger to scroll back and forth over my own new shiny device, only to look up and discover that an entire year has been blinked away.

On the one hand, I am fretful. Everything should slow down for a minute. Or a couple of hours. The inexorable march of time is too inexorable. I need some way to halt it, or slow it, so that I can clean the house before the weekend.

On the other hand, I am grateful, because 2015 has, in many ways, tried my patience. The myriad macro and micro outrages that have inflamed my tired mind are well worth leaving behind and not looking back at too quickly. I would like to run away to the hills of 2016, leaving the flaming wreckage of 2015, only not, like Lot’s foolish wife, looking back to see if there was anything I wanted to take with me. A clean, fresh slate, a quiet fire alone in a cave would be awful nice. Except that, Matt keeps telling me, it doesn’t work like that. I can’t fly away on the wings of a dove and be at rest, I have to take the children ice skating and then dig out of the school room before next week.

I will admit, though, that 2015 wasn’t all bad. In one or two, or maybe even three, ways it was one of the nicest years possible.

First, it was the year of The Luncheon. Somewhere along the way we were over taken by a flash of divine brilliance and scrapped the terrible trial of eating supper. Getting rid of an entire meal has been the golden dream every homeschool mother imagines it to be. There being one generous meal at a time of the day when it is emotionally, spiritually, and mentally possible to enjoyably consider it, is like flying along on a rainbow colored unicorn. It is that awesome. That all other meals fall into the hands of those who find themselves hungry, is so life giving, so charming, so…..honestly, I can’t gather enough words together to adequately describe how wonderful it is.

Second, this was the year of all the words, for me. I have always really liked messing about with words more than almost anything else. In high school I got myself in trouble with funny, hilariously timed (I thought) but not very kind writing. In college I luxuriated in all the paper writing and thinking and wondering. In seminary I discovered the thrill of the carefully crafted sermonette (sermonettes for Christinettes as we used to say). Then came the great and wonderful invention of blogging, in the early 2000s. But between 2014 and 2015 it seemed like I got to wade into a cool and enchanting stream, like the words started dripping off my fingers and onto the page. Writing a whole book, suddenly, compulsively even, was curiously the most thrilling experience ever. Matt will tell you that I’m not a very, what’s the word, disciplined, or driven person. I don’t have great ambitions. I really just wander around in a circle. But when I sit down to write every day, all the fog momentarily clears and it seems like I might actually go somewhere, or do something, or rather, I guess, say something. And then it’s gone and I relapse back into my usual confusion. This blog has been so fun. It’s been just jolly good fun to come here and write furiously and then go away only to come back do it again the next day. I’m so grateful to Patheos and to Bart for letting me be here amongst so many brilliant and interesting people, whose floors I am not worthy to scrub.

And finally, 2015 was the year of God’s grace. The last ten years or so I have muttered to God that I don’t really get it, that grace, whose definition is of course perfectly clear, is nevertheless something that slips through my egotistical and scatterbrained fingers. If you wonder about the name of this blog, and think to yourself, what kind of jerk wants to Prevent Grace, go over and click the tab, at the top, which explains the name. Preventing is what God does. It’s an old word, whose meaning has shifted. It used to mean ‘to go before’. God’s preventing grace is the grace of regeneration, it is the way that he brings our dead, stoney hearts to life. If he didn’t prevent us by his grace, we couldn’t believe. And yet, to play the word back to its modern use, even after we have been given life saving grace, even after we have been made alive, we constantly try to prevent God, to block him from working his grace all the way through. He prevents, and then we prevent. But he prevents more. His preventing grace is stronger than our stubborn prevention. God’s grace this year, even when I didn’t get it, even when I didn’t hold onto it, even when I sinned and failed, was so over-abundant, so sufficient for me, fixing and mending the brokenness that I myself caused, that I stand here, on this last day, more fixed, more sure than I ever have been before.

So, on to 2016! What’s the worst that could happen? Don’t answer that. We’ll have to just cope with it when it gets here.