And I blinked and realized I haven't written since May.
And I blinked and it was time to light the first Advent candle. With a two-year-old.
The seasons circled, and she's singing and rocking babies and making jokes about sad pigs at the breakfast table. Everything about her is change, is new territory that both delights and dismays me. She is glory and sin wrapped in new sentences, new rage, and new wonder.
And me? This season often leaves me feeling more like Groundhog Day than grounded, a dog chasing its own tail than a wreath bent in a beautiful rhythm of entering what's been completed.
It seems I'm stressed in the same ways I vowed to avoid last year. I worry about the same inconsequentials that I swore I'd let slide as last year. I feel the crush of patterns and pet sins and puttering around with holly that just HAS to be angled just right--that I've promised to lay aside year after year after year. My vision for God's coming in seemingly dead places is often as dim as last year and despair threatens like rain on the threshold of freezing.
But for bread.
And fish.
I've been reading through John with a few friends and have been struck twice by Jesus' breakfast in John 20.
Even after Jesus appears alive to his disciples, breathes onto them and tells them they're sent just like him, the disciples are somehow where they started, fishing and following Peter. Peter: wracked with disillusionment and guilt, doubting if the kingdom will ever come, through confusing Messiah or conflicted self, returning to ropes and isolation and ways his hands and heart remembers.
And to him, to these followers who forsook and who've fallen back into what they were before, Jesus offers exactly the food they need: bread and fish.
The same elements of a miraculous meal for five thousand, elements that embody provision and possibility and the promise that with him there's always enough.
And after breakfast? Jesus reinstates Peter, reminds him of his mission, and refocuses his eyes on following the one who always breaks so there'll be plenty.
For me, there's no coincidence that the candle we lit tonight's name is Hope.
There is hope for me, served hot over coals on the same shore I told myself I wouldn't wade near again.
In the midst of my return to old habits and hard-dying anxieties and helpless feelings in the face of my particular brand of brokenness, Jesus wants to eat with me.
He wants to spread before me reminders of his sufficiency, his abundance, his forever feeding of those who listen but who don't always do what he says right away.
And after breakfast? He wants to reinstate me, to remind me that my mission remains to feed from a place of grateful love, to remind me that the only thing that matters is following the one who waits for me when I wander.
There's room at the table for you, too, this season. Come eat with us?
