Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 105

Today's Daily 5:

1. 1 year, 105 days of making these lists
2. sleeping late
3. Starbucks from a friend
4. Painting pottery at a local shop with a friend and talking as we painted
5. recognizing growth
6. visiting a dollar store with mom and finding the items I was hunting for
7. laughing over the fact that the first advent candle that I was so dreading signifies hope
8. sparkly tissue paper for wrapping a gift
9. getting a ride home
10. spending the evening being creative, and assembling the first half of the Jesse tree ornaments from this blog, for the way I've chosen to uniquely recognize Advent this year.  I printed the ornaments and sat on the floor of my bedroom for a couple hours with various scrapbook supplies scattered around me, making the ornaments unique and personal and pretty.
11. a surprise few minutes of skype with a dear friend who is currently traveling
12. recognizing growth and being surprised and blessed to discover it
13. sitting here, propped in bed, and staring at the map of the world and "wall of happy" across from me
14. taking time to paint my fingernails
15. a weekend that was primarily quiet and full of restful things
16. escapist television on dvd
17. a mug of tea
18. sweet smelling oil in my oil burner
19. making choices out of care and restraint
20. finding reasons to laugh, and feel joy

First Advent

It's Sunday morning again, and I'm again laying in a darkened room, pondering.

It's the beginning of Advent today.  A new church year.  Just another season of waiting and longing.

And honestly, as I was laying here, I was pondering if I would even choose to acknowledge that this year.

This whole year has been full of drama, of feeling ripped apart, of waiting and longing.

I'm pretty tired of the longing.

Ironic for me to say that, given that just recently I wrote here about the fact that I feel like God has been challenging me to really long for things, to really dream and long for those dreams to be fulfilled.

And so I was laying here, pondering if this year I would "celebrate" (what a ridiculous word for recognizing this season) Advent.  I feel guilty for wanting to ignore it, for ignoring that part of my heart that just naturally tunes itself to the church year.  But honestly, I don't know that I'm up for that this year - for the aching that comes in these four weeks, waiting again for the coming of a Savior.

So I thought about how I could do it differently.  Could I skip the candles?  Is there a way to make this less of an achingly painful journey of waiting and more of a joyful expectation?  Could I just ignore it all together and show up on Christmas Day, and welcome a Savior?

Out of curiosity I clicked through here, to a site I bookmarked in one of the last several years, to see what candle is the first for Advent.

And the part of me that has fallen in love with a God who has a very ironic sense of humor in our conversations started laughing.

Hope.

The candle for today is Hope.

Hope followed by love, joy and peace.

Those don't so much sound like achingly painful concepts.  Maybe the opposite, actually.

And here's the thing - I'm on this journey of recognizing some twisted concepts in how I relate to God.  Like, for example, the idea that the only true moments of encounter with God are intense, scary, and painful.  The Advent season, for example, perhaps doesn't have to be marked solely by pain.

And that, that is a thought I needed to have whispered to me this year.

I don't know yet how I'll mark this Advent season.  For the last year, the Christ candle from my previous wreath has sat on my dresser, waiting, only being lit occasionally through the months. 

Tonight, though, if only for one week, I'll probably light a candle.  The space I live in could use the light of hope today.

And I'm pondering this.  Having a "Jesse Tree" this year.  (Though in my odd living reality, it will probably be not so much a tree as a string, hung across my map of the world and wall of happy memories.)

And who knows?  Maybe an Advent wreath will make an appearance.  Because hope, love, joy and peace are concepts I'm wanting a little more of in my life these days.  Because God is a God of those things, and meeting Him can be filled with those, instead of with fear, intensity, and pained exhaustion.

So, Come Lord Jesus.  Come and bring hope this day.

Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 104

Today's Daily 5:

1. sleeping in
2. waking without the terror and weight that some mornings bring
3. having one of dad's favorite apple streudels for breakfast this morning
4. a winter day sunny enough to require sunglasses
5. reading on the bus (I read another fabulous book about autism - Dancing With Max - more thoughts to come)
6. a Kit Kat bar
7. cute kids on the bus
8. being referred to last night by a long time friend addressing her daughter as "Auntie Lisa" - I love that I get to be Auntie Lisa
9. a stop at the farmer's market
10. the little sausage shop having my favorite sausage in stock for the first time in weeks (I don't actually like much sausage, but this little shop at the farmers market sells a turkey mango sausage that is so good when it's grilled with potatoes)
11. Google maps on my iphone and the transit directions it provides, making my ability to get to various places around the city so much easier
12. laughter
13. making friends through blogging - how fun is that?  that I'm "meeting" people all over the world because five years ago I started writing in this place
14. green beans (steamed, with butter and sweet chili sauce)
15. coconut scented bubble bath from The Body Shop
16. actually feeling relaxed and trouble free for a few hours instead of tense, scared, exhausted
17. green grapes
18. dad treating me to an old fashioned plain donut
19. magic bags
20. escapist television

Unlocked

A couple of weeks ago, on one of my last daily bus loops to read and pray before starting my job, I went with a book that was supposed to be "lighter fare" than what I'd been reading for the previous couple of weeks.  A novel.  I read fiction rarely, for a whole variety of reasons best not discussed in this post, but that day I had one that I figured would be a fit for my whole list of qualifications and I set off to read it.

The book was "Unlocked" by Karen Kingsbury.  It was an "easy read" that took me a little less that the three hour bus loop to finish it, but I definitely fought tears at several points throughout the story.  I'd picked it up because it was a story about an autistic boy, and the way music reached him, and that fascinated me.  I'm always fascinated by the way the mind works, and issues of mental health, but I had ulterior motives too.  A friend of a friend that I pray for has a child that's severely autistic and I was curious to understand more fully what that might look like.  And, someone challenging that I deal with on a regular basis is at the mild end of the autistic spectrum, and I was hoping to gain insight that would make interaction with that person a bit easier.

What I wasn't expecting was that God would speak to my heart deeply and move me to pray for both of those situations, and for others as I read.  It was that, that moving of my heart in an unexpected place as I rode the bus that day that drew tears as much as the moving story itself. Looking back, I'm so grateful I read this book.  I'm grateful for the insight into the challenges of parenting an autistic child that it gave to me.  I'm thankful for the conversation it opened with another friend, that led to another book suggestion on autism (one I plan to start reading on a bus loop journey today, actually).  But mostly I'm so thankful for the reminder that God will meet my heart in the most unexpected of places and use the most unexpected of tools.  That a deep drawing of my heart to prayer doesn't have to carry the intensity and pain and fear that I had been deceived into believing it must for the last several years.  But that instead, in the most ordinary of places, on a city bus, my heart can be overwhelmed with peace, with expectation, with love that carries a crying out to God for the things he is placing in my heart.  That it can be the most natural and simple of things.  And that because it is natural, it will stay with me.  I've paused over and over again  in the following weeks to pray for those people and situations, simply because a story engraved them on my heart in the language that God uses to speak to me, in the voice I recognize as the one he uses for me.  And that, my friends is a gift.  To have a request be a passion, spoken from love, and not a burden that weighs down and exhausts.

Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 103

Today's Daily 5:
(an introduction to the Daily 5 can be found here)

1. Waking to email from friends
2. blog comments
3. catching the bus I wanted this morning, making the commute smoother
4. waking and realizing that the promise of a weekend is only hours away
5. dinner with a friend, even though it was unexpectedly cut short
6. popcorn
7. a new water bottle
8. watching a movie with family
9. neck pillow
10. sort of escaping my crazy living arrangements for the weekend.