Expectation

December 23, 2022 | Leave a Comment

Happy Christmas Eve Eve

I’ve been wishing a “Happy Christmas Eve Eve” since long before Phoebe made it famous on Friends.

Christmas Eve Eve was a real thing in my house growing up. Christmas Day, even Christmas Eve, weren’t enough to contain what was the biggest event in our year. We started prepping for it in the springtime, planning gifts, making lists, and dreaming of the thrill. The year that my sister sewed me a life-sized doll? She started it on Valentine’s Day. Really.

We needed more than a day or even two to feel that sense of expectation. By Christmas Eve Eve, we were buzzing.

As real as the sense of expectation, though, was the sense of disappointment that descended by mid-morning on Christmas Day. Gifts opened, breakfast eaten, musical still playing on repeat for the seventy-sixth time, there was nothing more but to pick through the piles of opened gifts and wonder what came next.

What we celebrated was a holiday, not a holy day. It was an event on the calendar for giving and getting stuff that was supposed to signify the love we felt for each other in ways that our poor, emotionally grifting family couldn’t otherwise express.

I suspect it’s the same for many, but the gifts can’t fill a space intended for the manger. The food can’t fill empty hopes.

Christmas is, was and always will be a holy day if it is anything. We need to celebrate it as such or not at all.

So, no, a day or even two can’t contain the biggest event in history. So, I’ll go ahead and wish a Happy Christmas Eve Eve to everyone today, but with expectation of a different sort—expectation of love that doesn’t need gifts to prove its worth, expectation of joy that doesn’t end when the wrapping paper’s off, expectation of a Christ Child who will come again to heal us all.

June 6, 2022 | 2 Comments

My supposed-to sabbatical (Part One)

It’s Monday of the second full week of my supposed-to sabbatical. I was supposed to be in Ventura, CA, on the beach, for the month of June during my sabbatical. I was supposed to be walking dunes and eating at quaint cafes before taking long naps in the afternoon. I was supposed to be visiting with friends and colleagues. I was supposed to be reading and writing, free of the ordinary concerns of home and church.

But, several pulmonary embolisms later, my doctors have advised me that travel is questionable and staying by myself (however charming the accommodations) is out of the question. So, I’m trying to take sabbatical time at home. Ha! It turns out that my supposed-to sabbatical involves a whole lot of housework, because—you know—I’m home, so there are seven loads of laundry, [Read more…]

January 19, 2022 | Leave a Comment

Walking through mud: thoughts on another pandemic winter

Some days are like walking through mud: slow, heavy footed, and messy. This winter is like walking through mud.

Quarantine, test, isolation. Isolation, test, freedom (for a while). Someone else tests. Quarantine again. Test again. Cancel plans again. Again and again and again. And again and again and again.

We’re walking through mud.

I’ve had two remarkable–and unpleasant–experiences literally walking through mud. I’m trying hard to remember them and what I learned from them.

Here goes–

In 2011, our family spent a week in Lake City on the banks of Lake San Cristobal, which was formed by Slumgullion Slide, an earthflow (or rather a couple of earthflows) that cap the lake’s northeast side (here). It’s mud like you have never experienced mud, mud that didn’t wash off, mud that clung to us like the theme song of a sitcom from 1986.

My kids loved it. They ran, they played, they dug, they buried each other. They could, because they were young and, well, lightweight.

[Read more…]

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