Advent Check in.

It is not quite Christmas time for Christians who follow the liturgical year.  It is Advent.  A time of waiting.  A time of wondering what we do for God to be more manifest in the world. A time of pondering when God might come again and how?

In the past 10 years or so I have often spent a lot of Advent times thinking of pregnancy.  The beautiful and cruel waiting for a child.  My kids were born in different times of the year and so I spent Advent being a tiny bit pregnant, halfway pregnant, and so pregnant I would have given anything to have Christmas cancelled just so I could have my own body back.

But this year is a funny thing, I am not thinking about babies or wondering who these people will be... I am wondering what this life will be.

What is this life we are doing here?  Who will our friends be? What will become of this place and this story. 

This season of life, if anything is a season of Advent.

Those of us who follow a liturgical Church calendar also know that sometimes our personal spiritual lives do not match the energy of our communal one.  I am here. Searching for hope, trusting in the future, listening deeply to our now.  My spiritual director today asked me how Christmas will be for me and my spiritual life...I don't know.  My instinct is that I am not in a Christmas space...and that's ok.

In my experiences of life it is in our waiting and searching and asking and wrestling that wisdom comes.  That curiosity is fostered...so that's my prayer for this time.