The Christmas Roller Coaster

written by Michelle Randall

It’s that time of year when silent nights aren’t really the words we associate with Advent. It’s my own fault, but frankly Christmas is usually one of the busiest times of the year for me. It is full of wonderful things I love to do like baking and going to Christmas parties, but somehow in the middle of waiting and hoping, I end up riding a Christmas rollercoaster. A dear friend once wrote to me that life was like that – “waiting in line for a rollercoaster.” We wait in line, hear the screams, question our decisions, doubt, but anticipate the thrills. And we also worry, “Will someone fall out of these carts?”

Christmas sort of feels that way, too. While we’re waiting in line to celebrate the wonder that is the child in the manger, we lose ourselves in questioning the perfect gift to get Mom, doubting we’ll make it to the next party on time, and sometimes even hearing the screams of shoppers and new babies meeting Santa at Northpark.

Our lives are FULL to the brim during Christmas. But not for me this year.

For me, I’m trying to take a quiet Christmas – one with less traveling and fewer shopping malls – far from the hurry and the noise. One where peace on earth meets my own peace of mind. I have been sort of trying to stay off the rollercoaster ride of the season.
It’s a challenging time to get out of the world’s “quickaholic” mentality that says Christmas is about rushing around and clamoring about and that there is little time for stillness and waiting hopefully.

This kind of fast-forward-through-the-waiting-parts thinking is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls, “cheap grace.” We’re all looking for the easiest and quickest way to get through our lives, to get to the front of the line, to make it through the holidays. But seasons of our lives, including Christmas, are not just about the “arrival,” and are meant to be more like an unfolding, not just like the sound of a shotgun. It requires quiet moments of tender nurture, reflection and endurance. There is a quiet pause between the Annunciation and the birth. There is a waiting, an in between place.

And so I rush about, but I also STOP. Gandhi says “there is more to life than increasing its speed.” And stopping is hard because it forces us to think about our lives and the seasons we have found ourselves in. At Christmas, the opportunity arises for me to remember that it is about being “holy and mild” where “all is calm, all is bright.” Maybe in the in between places, we can learn to look inward rather than just pressing forward – and isn’t that what we need during the holidays? And this year especially. For many around the world, they are being forced to stop this season to face lost jobs, lost houses, lost 401ks and even lost dreams. Many are us are in a “middle place” in our lives.

The world around us celebrates new beginnings and victorious endings and sometimes forgets the journey. Like marriage, a new house, babies, death, promotions and we forget the importance of the in between places. Author Sue Monk Kidd says, “We live in a spiritual environment that tends to emphasize full-blown newness and a sense of ‘arrival’ in the mere time it takes to walk the length of a church aisle. Walking an aisle can be a marvelous thing, as long as we acknowledge that the aisle doesn’t end at the altar but goes on winding through life…. We’ve forgotten about the slow, sometimes tortuous, unraveling of God’s grace that takes place in the ‘middle places.’”

The Middle Places.

A time of growth, waiting, transformation.
A time of becoming and finally birth.

I hope this year that we can, in some small way, find a way to stop and cherish the middle places as we wait during Advent. I hope we can drop our consumer-driven, busy-body antics long enough to experience the gift of stillness and hope that waiting for Christmas offers our hearts.

Advent Week 3 Community Blog...

Written By Dallas Gingles

Political alliances, machinations; taxes; questions of birthplace; right to rule; terrorism – this is the story of Advent. As people who just lived through the longest political elections in United States history, these plot lines have worn thin, and we live in the self-indulged delusion that this is the reality of the world as we craft it. Advent is the confession otherwise.
Advent is political. From the little Jewish girl, Miriam's, prophetic speech promising overthrow of the ruling class, to the eastern magicians who recognize within the fabric of the cosmos a testimony to a new ruler (prompting infanticide), the story of the season is more deeply entangled in politics than the most ruthless negative ad anyone witnessed in the past two years or the most promising and hopeful of speeches.
In the Genesis account of God's creative work, the spirit is present, hovering, "brooding," and breathing into the cataclysmic "becoming" of "life, the universe, and everything," (Douglas Adams). In the Lukan account of Jesus' birth, the spirit is once again present, "come upon," the young teenage girl and bringing into the world a new reality, one bathed in the grace of liberation, the promise of hope, the promise of monetary salvation from those who have seized power in a constant succession of greed and injustice.
And, so it is that in 2008, after hearing rhetoric about all of these political realities from both sides of the aisle, that we are come to Advent, to the place of our waiting, to the place of stillness. Our vote does not count. The most powerful women and men in the world are wresting power and transferring its seat, but that does not matter. Now is the winter of the world's discontent. This is the promise, the frustration, of the Christian calendar, that every Advent we come to the end of the year, having worked, fought, pushed, pulled, wrestled with ourselves and others only to find that it matters not at all, but what God asks of us instead at this time is to wait. We are asked to see the world flung off its axis of power, and spin wildly in the cosmos as a little peasant boy is born in a barn, as a refugee, into the arms of a zealot mother who is a part of an occupied people. And, this promise looks nothing like our parades, our banners, our conventions, our so wildly misconstrued good intentions in the political system that rely on affirmation of Caesar and Herod, John Roberts and Barack Obama. We don't get a say here. We only get to confess. We confess that the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our God. We confess our allegiance is to no flag, to no building, to no book, but to a baby. This is the shock of Advent. It is to us that Jesus came, but it matters not at all if we want(ed) him to come – ever. We are left speechless, wondering, in the words of Brennan Manning, "shipwrecked at the stable."
Advent is scary as hell. More, actually. "Who can abide the day of his coming?" We do not have time to be sentimental. We cannot afford the modern lie that we are people of our own destiny, makers of our own way. No one is safe: not kings, congresswomen, not you, not me. The angels themselves testify otherwise. We are instead, the ones called by the spirit to recognize the difference of power and political structure, and as the Advent hymn puts so delicately, "come peasant, king to own him."

This Week's Advent Conspiracy...

As mentioned on Sunday, this week our tip for a different way to participate in giving meaningful gifts comes from the North Texas Food Bank. You can get your 2009 calendar by going over to their website HERE. Or at Journey Kaitlin will have some or you can tell her to get you some to avoid shipping costs.

Adv(L)ent

Sometimes in my meditations, I find myself thinking that this is Lent, not Advent.

Advent is supposed to be about waiting in the darkness for a coming light. That's why I love Christmas lights on a tree. Throughout December, you can often find me in a dark room letting the bright tree lights make my eyes do strange things—white neon lines cutting through the shadows, making wild scrawling graffiti in thin air, as if trying to cryptically communicate with me.

And yet I have to keep reminding myself that this is Advent and not Lent. My life has been destroyed over the past several years, nearly burned to the ground. And so I have a whole new life to create out of nothing. It's overwhelming. It's terrifying. And the light that Advent should bring feels eclipsed by the desert-darkness of Lent.

Lent is about waiting too. Waiting for Jesus to be crucified. And when he dies on the cross, every year we nail up with him our own expectations for what life should be. What dies on the cross with the Christ is everything we think of as order in the world. Because Jesus upends all of our expectations. When the baby came, they hoped he would reign on a throne, not hang dead on a tree. Yes, there is still hope because he is risen. But that hope looks nothing like what we imagined it would. And death always comes first.

And so this Advent, I feel torn between these two seasons. I feel like I'm in the desert, waiting for someone else to betray me and hand me over. And yet in the distance I also feel that maybe there is light. Far away. Liminally.

I am absolutely waiting this Advent. It's puzzling to me how present Lent is with Christmas this year. With each episode of hope I unexpectedly experience—from friends and family meeting my needs without complaint, to happy coincidences and new relationships—I want to believe these are divine signs encouraging my belief. It's as if some voice is saying it's okay for me to have faith in goodness, in the future. But then I remember the kind of suffering that's in the world. And hope feels like the most dangerous choice I could make. I carry both the hope and the pain around with me, like a beautiful gift that will break your back to bear.

I'm starting to think that Advent and Lent are not so far apart. At Christmas, a child is born, and in Lent, he dies—the baby comes, and the Messiah departs. Both events, though, mysteriously produce the same outcome: new life. The child brings hope to a waiting people, and the risen Christ brings new life to those who believe. Throughout both seasons, something is always already being reborn. And this Advent, I'm waiting to see if that something could be me.

-by Laura Baker

Advent Conspiracy

This is the video I mentioned last night at Journey. Each week at Journey during Advent we will highlight a specific example of something you can do this Christmas that is different from the norm of spending a lot of money on things people don't need. This week our highlight was on Heifer intl. (read about it in the post below this one).



Let us know if you have creative ideas or ways to re-orient how we 'do Christmas.'

Heifer International

For those of you who were interested in finding out more information, here is a link to Heifer's website. As we seek to be creative this year in giving the kind of gifts that can impact our world rather than clutter our closets, consider giving through Heifer. As we noted last night, when you donate an animal, the recipient family gives one of the offspring of that animal to a neighbor in need, and the gift continues on and on. We will have Heifer Christmas cards available free on the back table at Journey next week. You can give these cards to the person in whose honor you donated the gift.

Lastly, if you are interested in going in on a Journey-wide gift to Heifer, you can email me at danielle@journeydallas.com.