Advent 1.3: Feeling your pain

I have two exercise gurus that I depend on these days. One is Emily, my fantastic yoga instructor. The other is Jessica, who you can work with, too! 

During yesterday's workout, a particularly tough one, Jessica exclaimed, "I am with you! Feeling your pain." And in that moment in late 2017, as we panted and hefted our 10-pound weights, it didn't matter that she was actually speaking those words on January 29, 2013 when the video was first published. It didn't matter that she wasn't physically in the room with us. I knew that in that moment nearly five years ago, she had been exactly where we were (well, maybe a little more in shape since this is what she does for a living). She understood and had experienced the effort that we were putting into the exercise; in fact, much of the work I put into it was thanks to watching her own effort and hearing her encouragement on the other side of the camera.

I am with you! Feeling your pain, says the Lord our God, who feels our pain because God became flesh and dwelt among us. God is with us in the workouts of life, lifting the dumb bells, as we sweat and groan and yell at the exercise instructor on the screen who can't hear us (sorry, Jessica). And though God can hear us when we yell, in whatever space or time zone we're in, we don't always feel like that's the case. Sometimes, God makes us wait it out, push ourselves to the brink of throbbing muscles and pounding heart--but God is still there, experiencing it with us.

And then, no matter how interminable the exertion may seem, there suddenly comes the calm--the transition from lifting to stretching, from groaning to gratitude that we have bodies that can do even half of this good work. And we're stronger for tomorrow.

In yoga class, Emily often says that learning to breathe through intense and difficult stretches (pigeon, anyone?) will help us learn to breathe through intense and difficult life situations. I love this, the idea that applying our life breath so purposefully on an individual level, when it's just our mind and our body one-on-one, can strengthen our responses when we're out in the world among our fellow humans.

May our breath move us forward into this sometimes difficult time of waiting. And may God always be with us, through the struggle and the calm.

[Photo by Ricardo Estefânio on Unsplash]

Advent 1.2: Of sights reseen and songs reheard

Yellow or green?

My husband leaves early in the morning, long before the sun has even thought to peep over the horizon. His car has a specific rattle when he revs it up, one that I can typically hear from the other end of the house. But today, I drifted in and out of consciousness and missed his departing noise completely. It always bothers me when I don't hear it--how could I have fallen back asleep so fast, just underneath the surface of awaking? How could I miss it? And then, within seconds of wondering, I am falling again, hearing nothing but my odd pre-sunrise dreams.

What am I asleep to? What am I not hearing?

This fall, I took a nonfiction class where one of the assignments was to write about a place. I waxed eloquent about our extended family beach cottage, painted cheerful butter yellow, cozy and sandy and falling out-of-style amidst high rises and mansions sprouting up around it. Feeling nostalgic, I sent it to the cousin who owns the property. She wrote back, "I very much enjoyed your essay, but I offer you one correction. The cottage is not yellow, nor has it ever been. It is green."

What am I mis-seeing? What am I not seeing at all?

On All Saints Sunday, we always begin worship with hymn number 711, one of my favorites of all time, which welcomes tears into my eyes from the very first chord. I've always loved the last stanza especially: From earth's wide bounds, from ocean's farthest coast, through gates of pearl stream in the countless host... I always loved the idea of gates constructed of "pearl stream," whatever that was. A heavenly material indeed, maybe made from some divine oyster. Two weeks later, we sang the very same hymn, triumphant in the midst of deafening sorrow at a dear friend's unexpected funeral. From earth's wide bounds, from ocean's farthest coast, through gates of pearl stream in the countless host... And after 30 years, in this moment, it suddenly clicked. Through gates of pearl/stream in the countless host. Noun/verb.

What am I reading or understanding one way that needs to be examined differently?

These questions aren't meant to imply that my ways of hearing (or not), seeing, and understanding all of these things have been wrong. I kind of love my creativity in these--especially the gates of pearl stream bit. But they do remind me that I can fall asleep easily, that I can root myself so firmly in a version or definition of something that needs to be re-looked at, from another perspective.

In Advent (and always), keep awake, keep alert--be mindful of the pieces of the picture I'm missing.

Advent 1.1: Waiting Place

My backyard is a place of waiting.

I didn't think of it that way until this morning, the first Sunday of Advent, when I took the dog out into the thick, mesmerizing fog covering the weedy wildness that lies behind our house.

I didn't think of it until now, probably, because for the first 3 years of living here, I barely broached the boundaries of our far-away fence that meets a medical center parking lot.

Instead, I stuck primarily to the portion of the yard we felt we could manage--the grill and patio, the slice of grass, the small vegetable garden, the azalea bushes. I had no real desire to venture beyond into the undependable, uneven earth laden with pine straw and ivy and thorny vines.

Becoming a dog owner is what has led me to become more acquainted with said wildness at least three times a day since October. The edges of the yard are Lucy's paradise, full of smells that set her senses thrumming, and set me stumbling over hidden roots as I follow her. She's on the leash even in the fenced-in yard because she's being treated for heartworms, and her exercise must be restricted until the spring.

I wish I could explain to her why she's stuck with me tugging dully on her leash when all she wants to do is streak like lightning over, under, around, through every corner and curve of her new queendom. I wish she would understand it if I said, you have to wait, and it's for your own good.

There's so many ways to think about waiting, and several of them crossed my mind as I stood there in my bathrobe admiring the fog that gives even the familiar a tinge of mystery (Advent indeed), waiting as Lucy traipsed around in the ivy and pine straw to find the perfect place to fertilize. Maybe this is what God feels like sometimes. Waiting on us, watching us traipse around, until (if) we get our shit together.

Saying, you have to wait, and it's for your own good.

But does an all-knowing God even experience waiting? Or is waiting just another way that we humans express our impatience, our greed for instant gratification? Of course, there are so many types of waiting to begin with. Eager anticipation, panicked dread, hearts pounding in both cases. And then there are the more mundane moments of waiting... like waiting for your dog to finish her business in the backyard.

If God waits, I like to think it's in solidarity with our human waiting--Emmanuel, God with us, after all. In fact, maybe it's in our moments of waiting where God is most strongly present; when we don't know what's next (or--sometimes even harder--we do), when life is as clear as the fog.

Before we know it (I'm telling myself), spring will be here, and Lucy will be declared heartworm free. I'm already anticipating her joyful dashing up and down, over and around, finally able to have full run of her domain.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining, til He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.