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.