Slow down. Rest. Wait.

In the middle of November I started to anticipate the holiday season with a combination of excitement and weariness. Once I get over the initial shock of the end of daylight savings time, I love settling in for fall and winter. It's not that I don't love summer. Long summer nights, soaking up sun in the park, fresh berries, trips to mountain lakes, lazy afternoons in hammocks--all beautiful and good things. But around October, I'm ready to slow down, to sit inside and read a book, to cook with things that take a little longer like butternut squash, potatoes and pumpkin.

Just when I start to establish a slower pace and really relax at Thanksgiving, December takes off, carrying me along like I'm on a moving walkway. I try to maintain the same pace, but the ground sweeps me along, rushing towards December 25. The city is flooded with people here for one holiday event or another and the amount of activities going on is overwhelming.

I usually step off the airplane in my old hometown around December 23, in desperate need of a silent retreat. Instead I spend a week in a mountain cabin that I love dearly, but with minimal personal space and very few moments of alone time.

So I paused in November and thought through how I would spend this December. I didn't want the frantic pace that has defined every other December in my life. I didn't want to arrive at my parent's house, exhausted from far too much holiday spirit. I knew it might mean giving up a party or two in favor of time on the couch with a good book and hot tea. It might even mean not baking as much. (Chocolate-cookie fans have no fear. I will still make a batch or two.)

I don't have a tree, I haven't planned my holiday cards and I haven't started the party circuit. There are no twinkly lights up, and I don't have much interest in listening to cheesy Christmas music. In the space that I'm in with wrestling with injustice, some of the merriment seems a little hokey.

So I committed to participating in advent--to sit down everyday and go take on the posture of waiting and of understanding just how much I am in desperate need of the birth of Jesus. A dear friend read me a passage this week from one of my favorite authors, Shauna Neiquist. In her latest book, Bittersweet, she writes--

It's Advent right how, and this year especially, I'm really thankful for Advent. Advent is about waiting, anticipating, yearning. Advent is the question, the pleading, and Christmas is the answer to that question, the response to the howl...Advent is what saves us from giving up on Christmas and all its buoyant twinkling-light hope forever. Advent allows us to tell the truth about what we're grieving, without giving up on the gorgeous and extravagant promise of Christmas, the baby on his way...I don't know what you've lost this year: a life, a friend, a child, a dream, a job, a home. I don't know what's broken your heart this year, but I do know that whatever it is, you may feel the loss of it even more acutely at Christmas. There are years when the Christmas spirit is hard to come by, and it's in those seasons when I'm so thankful for Advent...Give up your false and failing attempts at merriment and thank God for thin places, and Advent, for a season that understands longing and lonliness and long nights. Let yourself fall open to Advent, to anticipation, to the belief that what is empty will be filled, what is broken will be repaired, and what is lost can always be found, no matter how many times it's been lost.

And so I rest. And wait. And believe that the celebration will be richer at the end, having sat in the yearning and anticipation of the only one who can save us from our broken humanity.