“Of that day or hour, no one knows, not the Divine Messengers in heaven, nor the Son of Humanity. Only the Holy One” (Mark 13:32).
For those still getting emails or occasionally checking this site, thank you for your indulgence in this latter half of the year. I knew after completing the summer devotional series that I needed a break. The year had been, up to that point, dotted with a number of stressful moments. And as we encountered the moments that have come between August and now…well, I was happy to have one task off my plate.
Arriving at Advent, I found I had nothing to say about this season. Oh, there was the tried and true reminders that this was a season of waiting, of preparation, but, as can happen at the keyboard from time to time, I realized that everything that came to mind had been said before. As Thanksgiving came and behind it the first of December, Advent did not inspire me. I was grasping, even in my personal devotional life, for some resonant sense of the season.
This morning, with my first cup of coffee in me and an overcast sky above the brown grass outside, I noticed something, but only after it had stopped. But before saying what, I need to catch you up.
In August, the company I work for (and have for almost a quarter century) announced it would be restructuring. Nothing was sacred. Everything was going to be re-evaluated, and we’d likely end up in new positions. The new structure would be announced in mid-October. So, pretend like everything’s normal while we turn your work life upside-down.
While on vacation in October, the email came that told us that, by the way, with this change, four-hundred folks would be laid off. You’ll learn who next week. Somehow, Leanne and I manage to shove that in a little box and enjoy the days we had on the beach. And, I’m thankful to say that, in the week that followed I was one of the ones who got to keep earning a paycheck. I let go of the breath I’d been holding.
In the early portion of the year, a friend of the family passed away and we took in his thirteen-year-old cat Rose. Not a couple months after coming into our home, Leanne noticed blood in the litterbox, which began months of trying some different diets and medicine until November when we learned that our Rose had colon cancer. And over so many conversations with vets during those weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, we came to the awful knowledge that there was nothing we could do for her. And on the Monday of Thanksgiving week, a damp and rainy day, we said goodbye to our Rose. Sighing amidst our tears.
On 13 December, not forty-eight hours from the time I write this, my mother died. It was sudden. In one moment my dad was talking to her about the Christmas lights, and the next, reentering the house, he found her gone.
This was a tough year for her. She had a fall in February that required stitches in her head. There were more falls during the spring, and in June she spent several days in the hospital when they found a subdural hematoma on her brain.
But, like the cut on her head, it healed. By August, when I got word of an impending upheaval, the hematoma had been absorbed. The anti-seizure medicine was stopped. She was better. But, even so, I my pulse quickened each time my parent’s number popped up on my phone.
This brings us back around to this morning with the world outside wet from yesterday’s rain. Sitting and reading the verse above, I realized that somewhere over the past day or so, I’d exhaled. As with the other times, I noticed only in the aftermath, after some event had come and passed, that I’d been holding my breath.
Advent, as has been written and said time and time again, is a waiting season. It is, at heart, celebrated as anticipatory. It is a season of acting and living as though something were coming, as if there was some event due to happen. And, certainly, there is in these days when the sun rises late and sets early a sense of looking to the east for something to come and change the world.
But waiting also can contain, as I’ve felt this year, the stress that the change to come may be something less than glorious. It’s the tension in the neck as you keep one ear turned for the phone you’re afraid will ring, or the soreness in your throat from yet another conversation, or the fatigue in your eyes looking for the email or invite that will tell you your fate.
It’s the waiting that comes when a glass slips out of your hand headed for the tile floor, or the first whine of the tornado siren sounds. It’s then that we hold our breath, our bodies holding onto air just before the plunge beneath the surface. And we don’t exhale until the shattering or the winding down. Or we break again into open air.
This is the waiting this verse can contain: the moments, months, or year of knowing something’s coming but not knowing when.
The time before we breathe again.
Incarnate One, wait with us and breathe for us when we’re unsure what’s coming next.