I was asked to think about what colors kept coming to me as I thought about this year.

Color? Are you kidding me? Pshhh, this won’t resonate with me. I am a word girl.

I started a painting, or finished painting, or continued painting (I can never really tell with painting.) I kept picking up the bronze. The silver is too singular, the gold is too showy, the bronze has the earthy depth I am looking for.

Okay, so it is bronze…maybe. I do like the way this bronze is picking up the pink tones that are hidden about three layers deep that I forgot were there.

I was asked to look up the significance of the color that was standing out to us, coming to mind. Historically, spiritually what does this color mean?

What do you mean, what does this color mean. Colors having meanings, is that even a thing?

I googled it.

This is not going to be important. This is silly. God does not speak to me through google searches and swathes of color

It was the first hit. It was the first sentence in the first hit.

BRONZE or BRASS: stands for the place where we touch this earth: our feet.

Lately people have been posting, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, pictures of their feet, declaring that they will be where their feet are. The explanation of bronze went on to talk about it being sort of a glowing brown. The place where the earth meets the holy. The holy being us, the holy being our feet.

Do I believe that? Do I believe that anywhere I put my feet has the potential to glow with His presence? In my classroom, at the playground, in my car, in my kitchen? Can these spots also be Holy ground?

I would in the past have said of course, of course I believe in an endless supply of Holy ground, in all things being sacred. I blog at accidental devotional, my tagline says that God shows up. But lately I am realizing that if I want the place my feet hit the ground to glow with His presence, that I better be there too. All of me, paying attention, showing up.

My word is here and my color is bronze, the place where we touch this earth.

May I learn to leave footprints, glowing in the earth, because He was present, and I was there to notice.

I learned a new word last year. I teach SAT vocabulary, and in general like words. I get excited reading about the word of the year or which words got added to the dictionary. Learning new words isn’t new to me.

But last year I learned the word scarcity, from my friend Esther, and suddenly my world made more sense that it ever had.

Scarcity is the idea that there is not enough. And scarcity is a lie. There is enough. There is always enough.

But more often than not I operate in the realm of scarcity. A few ladies I really respect got agents and book deals; things I want. I got jealous, I got scared. What if I don’t get to do the things I dream of, things I believe God has called me to?

There isn’t a scarcity of platforms, of book deals, of agents. I will walk the path God has for me, not because there is not enough to go around, but because this is the abundant path for me. There is enough.

My weight creeped up on me this semester. I don’t weigh myself regularly, but my pants started getting really tight and it occurred to me to check in. One look at my eating habits and I knew the problem. Scarcity.

I eat like there is never enough. If it is delicious I won’t stop till it is gone. When will I get it again? What if I don’t? Just one more bite. What if someone else gets to it first? This is crazy. CRAZY! All the best food I have eaten lately I made. I can make it whenever I want. There is enough. Absolutely enough for me to abstain and not miss out on anything.

I stress myself out on a regular basis making very minor decisions, like which groceries to buy, which present to pick, which route to take. Usually, these decisions are such that there is no wrong answer, all answers are acceptable, and yet…yet I am pulling out my hair and beating myself up because, THERE IS ONLY ONE RIGHT ANSWER AND OH MAN I MADE THE WRONG ONE AND COST US (three minutes, six dollars, absolutely nothing) AND IT IS ALL MY FAULT. Scarcity of perfect choices. That isn’t real.

Scarcity is a lie, and I am not believing it anymore. I am choosing to believe that there is enough. Of everything. Of time and talent and book deals. Of good food and friendship. Of anything God has for me. There is enough.

So go to hell scarcity. Your lies aren’t welcome here. I am resolved.

I started the one word as a resolution on a whim. I had a three month old, a nineteen month old, and I was staring my return to the classroom in the face as my husband was returning to his second semester of PhD school. I asked for enough. I just needed enough,  needed to be enough, wanted to be able to pull it all off. I was given grace. And in the leaning into grace I found enough. Last year I was feeling trapped, tied, I had been thinking of this wild and free God we serve and I wanted more freedom in my life. I asked for freedom, nope. Free? No. I was very clearly given unashamed and this year I have found a lot of freedom.

You know where this is going. I did some dream journaling this year at my birthday weekend. I kept asking for growth. In my marriage, in my blogging, in my career. I feel like these last two years have been years of pruning, of stripping away attitudes and patterns in my life that aren’t healthy and aren’t from the Lord. I am ready for some new blooms to spring up. I can smell the new growth in the air. So I asked for it. I asked for grow. I even tried it out, told some people that might be my word. It wasn’t. It isn’t. I was told no. And frankly, I was mad about it.

So, I had nothing. No idea. I wasn’t thrilled with that either. The Lord knew I would hate my word, likely reject it. So the Holy Spirit made sure I heard, and gave me a word uniquely suited to me. Two words actually. They just sound the same.

If you are familiar with my writing at all, you know that I am really not as careful as I should be. There and their, two and too, pair and pear, come on, people can figure it out. Sometimes, I use the wrong word, prefer the accidental meaning and keep it on purpose. I mean, not often, but sometimes. So I got the word here, and I said no, so I got hear. And I didn’t say no but I did get pissed, because these words are going to be hard, because these words confront a lot of my coping mechanisms.

I am perpetually sure that life will be way better about two years from now (whenever now is). But it has gotten really bad in the last six months or so. My husband is in his third of four years in a PhD program. Next spring he will, hopefully, be interviewing for jobs. I am awesome at making up futures for us based on the jobs that may not even be real that I decide he is going to get. If you have a college in your town, and we have interacted on twitter, chances are I have dreamed up a pretty detailed life raising my girls in your town.

And chances are I have dreamed up living in your town on the days living here is hard. Teaching in this political climate isn’t getting any easier. And teenagers in general are just always hard. I know everyone tells me to make sure I don’t wish the toddler years away, and I love the hilarity and the cuddles, but I do dream of a future where everyone goes to the bathroom by themselves, and never in their pants.

If I am brutally honest with you, it is often the messes I am imagining away. In the future I live in, in my head, there is a church that believes everything I do, a perfect house, more time to write, magically built-in like-minded community and a really easy job. In the future in my head nothing is messy. But life is messy.

A funny thing happened as I cleaned my house to prepare for my family coming. I remembered that I loved it, loved my house, loved my neighborhood. I remembered that I heard, and that is how I got here. That it has always been like that for me.

I don’t want to live in a future that I create in my head, I want to be here. In the real, where it is messy. I want to learn to clean it up and let it lie and know when to do which. (I think that is where the hear comes in.) I want to be here, wherever here is, and in the place that the Lord has put me, I expect to hear his voice.

Looking back at the year I can see that God was prepping me for “unashamed” before 2013 rolled into town. New year’s Eve is also my wedding anniversary, so it is a busy time. A few days prior my friend had pulled a few strings with her friend and he agreed to take a look at my online presence. If I was really going to make a go at this blogging thing I needed someone to show me the ropes. Collin Kelly did just that.

I had to learn about self-promotion, about how to value my own skills, how to stand up unashamed and say, Hey! I have something to say about that. Hey! What I know maybe is important too. I had to learn to choose myself. I learned in this year of unashamed, to not wait for someone to pick me out of a crowd, to stand up and say, Hey! Pick me!

It wasn’t natural. I spent the first few months on twitter typing something out and not posting it, then daring myself with my one word. “What would you do if you were unashamed?” Usually I would click send. So I did. Look twitter is where people all watch tv shows together but in a place where pants are optional, but also, some really interesting conversations about social justice and religion, and the intersection of these things is being had. Right at the moment I worked up the nerve to ask my friend, unashamed, if I could post for her series, she up and asked me.

That post took off in a way no one was expecting. A bunch of people I really respected linked it and shared it, and I was featured for the first time as a Rachel Held Evans Sunday Superlative. My husband and I joked I won the internet. Somewhere in the comments section someone re-sparked my desire to write the book I had started six years ago. What if I was unashamed to say there was a book inside of me?

Turns out if you name the book inside of you it comes on out. I have a manuscript to prove it. In the millions of tiny unashamed steps I started calling myself a writer. Then I decided to pay for a class. At the least I figured it would extend my platform a smidge. I joined Story Sessions this spring when I finally learned to be unashamed to ask for things I want, even when they cost money. My amazing husband didn’t even blink. Of course. Just like that I found my tribe. And they cheered me on when I wrote my two most popular posts ever. 200,000 and 100,000 view respectfully. They held my hand when I wrote and edited my book. They tell me they believe it will get published when I get rejected by agent after agent. Then they kick me off of Facebook when I am supposed to be editing. I cannot imagine my year without them.

In the spirit of unashamed I wrote about my boobs, my frustration with the church and my job, about crapping my pants in public. People still loved me, and accepted me, on-line and in real life. I need not be ashamed of what I really think.

Unashamed didn’t just change my online appearance. In February I got my nose pierced, in October I got a tattoo. I decided to stop being ashamed of the things I wanted, that if I really wanted them they weren’t silly. It seems it wasnt just on Twitter that I needed to decide to choose myself.

I have laughed louder, said more, painted (but not as much as I wanted to). I wrote my butt off this year, maintaining my blog while I wrote 100,000 words of one and a half manuscripts. I looked myself square in the face as I stopped worrying about what any one else thinks, and I turned into a person that it turns out I really like.

Unashamed was quite a ride. But it was so good I asked God if I could keep it for another year. I got a no. But I have about 36 more hours of unashamed, and I plan on using every inch of them up.

I hope you had the merriest of Christmas. I took December off and hope you have enjoyed last year’s reflections. I’ll be back shortly to reflect on this year and announce my word of the year for 2014.

Santa came and we lit the Christ candle. And yet, here I am, blogging through advent. I know that Christmas was a few days ago, and in a few days people will be irritated at those of use still insisting on celebrating Christmas. I know today Christmas has already passed, but this is not the end. My grandfather dying, the mourning families in Newton, the broken relationships, the fiscal cliff. This is not the end. We are waiting on love, and so we wait in love.

Sometimes we get it just right, sometimes we mess it all up, sometimes, most times, we do the best we can and it is somewhere between those too. But always, always, things done in love are not wasted. Every drop the Lord can use. We love in the waiting, because we are waiting on love. And it  is enough because I am enough. And I am enough because He is enough. And that is who we are waiting for.

He came once, he is coming again. Hallelujah.

In an effort to lean into Advent, I took December off. I hope you have been enjoying my reflections from last year, and I hope you are having the best Christmas ever.

It came upon the midnight clear, 
that glorious song of old, 
from angels bending near the earth 
to touch their harps of gold: 
“Peace on the earth, good will to men, 
from heaven’s all-gracious King.” 
The world in solemn stillness lay, 
to hear the angels sing.

When the angels came to the shepherds, it was only the few that stopped what they were doing and ran to the stable. Most people in Bethlehem went on about their business, completely oblivious to the heavenly hosts, completely ignorant of the message they brought, the baby in the manger that had come to love the world in a way no one had ever seen, before or since. The world did not in solemn stillness lay, it kept on keeping on clear skies or not people had stuff to do.

Being a Jesus lover, a bringer of the good news, feels a lot like singing into the chaos. The world tells me that people don’t change, that love is not enough to move someone to safety, that love is a band-aid over a bullet hole and that wound will never stop festering, will never heal. Even the love of Jesus, they tell me, even the sacrifice of God, it doesn’t matter. People don’t change.

Still through the cloven skies they come 
with peaceful wings unfurled, 
and still their heavenly music floats 
o’er all the weary world; 
above its sad and lowly plains, 
they bend on hovering wing, 
and ever o’er its Babel sounds 
the blessed angels sing.

I’ve heard it said that to believe that someone cannot change is to short change the gift of the cross. Over and over I am learning that what Jesus came to earth to save me from is myself. The ways of this world are inherent to my being and I feel myself refusing to grasp the love of Christ that I am then asked to give away because it means letting go of the anger I hold so dear. It means grace where consequences are called for. It means trusting that forgiveness is better than giving what they deserve. There is so much for me to stop listening to, if I want to hear the angels sing.

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load, 
whose forms are bending low, 
who toil along the climbing way 
with painful steps and slow, 
look now! for glad and golden hours 
come swiftly on the wing. 
O rest beside the weary road, 
and hear the angels sing!

Weary is how I have been feeling lately. Weary of loving, because frankly it doesn’t make any sense. It feels like dumping effort into a bottomless well and crossing my fingers that the water will rise. The world, in all of its weariness has been whispering the fruitlessness of love in my ear and I have been believing it. If I don’t shout ENOUGH! than who will? Where is the line that says “you have loved enough, you are released?” I’ve been looking for it pretty hard. If it were there I probably would have found it.

My parents have chosen love for the past year, as they are housing, feeding, and otherwise parenting a teenage boy in the hopes that he will graduate and have a sliver of hope in this world. Topping the list of poor decisions this boy has made is throwing a party that ended with a hole in the wall of my mother’s dining room. My sisters and I see the hole and get angry, we point toward the door. My parents shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. This is what they were called to, to love this boy. I end up crying bitter tears in the bedroom of my youth. How, I ask God, can loving someone well sometimes leave you with nothing but a hole in the wall and the promise to do better? It doesn’t seem fair.

 For lo! the days are hastening on, 
by prophet seen of old, 
when with the ever-circling years 
shall come the time foretold 
when peace shall over all the earth 
its ancient splendors fling, 
and the whole world send back the song 
which now the angels sing.

God is asking me to join the chorus of angels, the singing of love. He promises that this life is not the end. He tells me that everything that adds up to an empty promise and a hole in the wall is calculated very differently in terms of His Kingdom. He reminds me that love is always the right choice, even when it does not feel like it.

His angels in the field on the night with the shepherds (regardless of the weather) remind me that God makes good on his promises. Especially when those promises are love.

I took December off. I am sure by now I miss y’all very much. I hope you enjoy my Advent reflections from last year.

This season I was grateful to have my daughters hooked on Netflix. Not only can the Peanut name more kinds of dinosaurs than I will ever be able to (thanks Dinosaur Train!) but we have avoided almost all holiday commercials. Somehow I think the Beatles sentiment “money can’t buy me love” is much closer to the truth than Kay Jeweler’s “every Kiss begins with Kay!” What does that even mean? The  ONLY reason people kiss is because one gives the other diamonds? There are about a million babies on this planet whose existence speaks to the truth that close physical contact happens far more often than diamonds are givens.

It isn’t just at Christmas that we are being convinced that if we love someone we will buy them something special, and by special they usually mean expensive. Perhaps it is just me remembering through rose colored glasses, but I don’t remember Easter and Valentine’s day presents being such a huge deal. A brick of chocolate in the holiday appropriate shape always did quite nicely. When did the Easter bunny start bringing diamonds? When did Santa become a one stop everything I want shop rather than the benevolent uncle who brought one or two things you liked? When did expensive jewelry become the go to gift, rather than a once or twice in a lifetime affair?

When did we become convinced that we can accurately represent our love with stuff?

My kids got spoiled this morning. Not by us. Santa brought one present a piece to my lovelies, and stockings were stuffed with 1 book, crayons, and a peanut butter-chocolate Santa (Priscilla would be happy to trade you her Santa if you have some more crayons for her to eat). Most of those presents said “from Grandma.” Of everything they got this year, I think this Christmas will be remembered as the Christmas of the shopping cart and baby stroller. They are pushing them around as I type this. Priscilla has her baby doll in there and is bouncing up and down. “Look, see, see, baby, WHEEEEE” as she careens around the house making motor noises. (Apparently it is a very fancy baby stroller!) They love them even though they are not the fanciest presents they received. Grandma picked them up at the last second because she saw them and couldn’t resist. The girls adore them, and that makes this the Christmas of the wheeled carts.

I spent the better part of an hour the other night frantically searching the house with my husband. On top of bookshelves, underneath couches and beds, we shook out blankets and checked inside pillowcases. Nothing. Well, at least not what we were looking for. We were on the hunt for a three inch bear, pink and second-hand, Juliet has christened this bear “baby teddy” and likes to sleep with it and the mommy teddy every night. It isn’t anything special really, but Juliet loves it, and that makes it special.

We have made new friends, who feel like old friends spent a couple years in a far off land. There, they learned to call God, “Dad.” It is catching with us, as we bow our heads together. “Dad.” I was reminded Sunday that it is the birth of Jesus that makes this possible, my ability to approach the creator of the universe in such a familiar manor, “hey Dad?” And I am his child. If I listen hard enough sometimes I hear him answer just like I to my girls “yes lovey?”

Perhaps it has been said before that you can’t buy love…but it is costly. My savior came down as a baby in a manger, to suffer all the indignities of humanity. So that I could call the  great I am, Dad. In everything I do, in everything I botch, I am loved, and that love makes me special. It has very little to do with me, the loved, and everything to do with the Lover and how He chose to love me.

I am taking a break this December. I hope you enjoy my reflections from last year.

Lately my prayers have sounded something like this: I am done, this is too hard, I am hoarse from shouting into the darkness and I can’t fight for joy anymore.

This isn’t the depression talking; this is something else. It seems I have been tuned in this year to certain words in the carols I have sung forever and forever ignored, words that speak of the earth as weary, groaning, needing relief.  Seriously Lord, how much longer are you going to make us wait? How in the world can I find joy in this place? This doesn’t even make any sense.

This morning, as I pulled into the driveway of the house I grew up in, I saw a glimmer of what I am looking for. When I was in the first grade, the giant pine tree in the side of our yard  fell down in a thunderstorm. That year the Easter bunny hid our eggs in it. The same year my sister Jill went to an arbor day celebration and came home with a pine tree sapling. She planted it next to the stump of the old one. I don’t think that anyone but Jill thought it would actually grow.

For about three years, when there was enough snow that school was canceled Jill would get up anyway, put on her boots, and dig that dumb sapling out of the snow. I stayed in bed and rolled  my eyes. This digging was worthless.

The tree is now full grown, as tall as the other trees that were full grown when my parents bought the house. The tree made it, the digging mattered.

I am not the first person to wait on the Christ child. The Israelites did it the first time, the believers in the new testament were sure the second coming was eminent, my dad says as a child of the cold war he was a little stunned when he made it to thirty. I am not the first to look around and decide that my actions, desires, prayers mean nothing against the darkness of the world.

The digging out that I do, the candles in the dark that I light, the whispers in the darkness matter, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Perhaps, especially then. They matter because they point in both directions, to the savior who already came, to the promise he is coming again. They matter because occasionally they grow into big and beautiful things, a testament that someone cares.

Today, I feel like lying down, like saying, “It will snow tomorrow, so why the heck should I dig today?” I dig today because this is not forever. I dig today because I know that one of these tomorrows joy will come down again, just like he did the first time, just like he promised.

In an effort to listen, anticipate, reflect the coming of Christ, I decided to go quiet around here. I hope you enjoy last-year’s reflection.

Last night I finally got around to lighting the candle of Joy. I try to do it on Sundays, but life occasionally interferes. According to my churches advent guide, this is the candle of the shepherds and the kings. All of the visitors joyously coming to see the new baby who also happens to be God are represented by the tiny flame on my dining room table.

I always imagine there were a lot of shepherds . Perhaps that is because in an effort to include all children in the Christmas pageant most churches go about it like this. Pre-schoolers: you are the sheep. 2nd and 3rd graders: Shepherds. Anyone else not picked out of the hat for something there is only one of like Joseph or the inn keeper, or wiseman number 2, you make up the angel choir. I have seen a lot of Christmas pageants and that is pretty much the way it goes. But I am starting to wonder if maybe we got it all wrong.

There are seasons where I have been the shepherd. Where God has shown up in my life big and glorious. Healing, visions, dream and words. I am blessed to say that there have been shepherd moments in my life. God can and does show his wonder to people in ways that can only be described as miraculous. There are moments in this life where his presence is so big it encompasses the entire night sky. Where all you can do is shout the truth of it all, the goodness, and run straight to the savior and fall on your face in gratitude. Joy comes bursting through you and out of you in direct response to an incredible encounter with God.

This season, for the first time I am drawn to the wisemen, the kings, the strangers from the east. It isn’t that I think I am any more educated, or smarter than the next guy. It is more in the way that God appeared to them. A tiny light in a very dark sky, a glimmer of something that caused them to start their search. Lately God has been looking more like a pinprick of light than a band of heavenly hosts. He has me on a journey through a land that is unfamiliar to me. There is enough light to follow, but it isn’t quite as blindingly obvious as it has been in the past, but still I follow, I seek, I wonder after the sign.

No one really know how many of anybody there were in the stable in Bethlehem. We know there was more than one shepherd. We know there were three separate gifts. Somewhere down the line we have decided that the shepherds were numerous, the wisemen few. I wonder right now if that isn’t reversed. When the holy of holies sends an army of Angels to sing about something, that you can prove in the flesh with a trip down the street, perhaps you only need three or so people to deliver that story to the masses. There seems very little room for doubt.

Maybe it was the wisemen who showed up en mass. Perhaps it took a whole group of them to decide this was in fact worthwhile, this one star was worth a very long trip where they weren’t even sure what they would find at the end, what the face of God looked like. I wonder if they took turns leading the way, spotting the star. I wonder if there weren’t some grumblers at the back some days, who had just had it with the whole journey and were whispering that maybe everyone should just give up and go home. I wonder if they took turns, being the leaders, being the grumblers, feeling sure of the way, and feeling lost.

Maybe one day I will be in charge of the Christmas pageant and I’ll go through the Burger King drive through and anyone who is tired of wearing their sister’s butterfly wings will sport a crown, and only the lucky few whose names are drawn from my hat will wear tea towels tied to their heads and carry their grandfathers cane as a shepherds crook. Maybe everyone’s nativity is different and sometimes you are the Shepherds, sure of what you see, and sometimes you are a wise man, hoping that you are following the right glimmer in the sky, and sometimes, sometimes you are Mary herself, birthing the things that the Lord has placed within you.

It is hard and confusing and painful, it is joyous and miraculous and clear. Because at the end of the journey, of the message, of the birth, there is Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. Sometimes you are the shepherd and sometimes you are the wise man but always, always, Jesus is there, right where God led you.

In an effort to lean into the season of Advent, I am re-posting my posts from last year. Pardon the dated Starbucks references.

I bump my hip against the door of the local Starbucks. My hands are full. Sick baby in one hand, laptop bag in the other. I am hoping to get some work done. She has wanted nothing more than to lay with her head against my chest since three o’clock the previous morning. I need some coffee and a change of scenery. Being home reminds me I took the day off of work to take the baby to the pediatrician.When I am home I constantly check the time against the group of students who are in my room and wonder whether or not my presence is strong enough to control them even when I am not there.

The Seasonal drinks are available and the Christmas music is blaring. I order a peppermint mocha as tall as my forearm. My cup invites me to Rekindle and then in parentheses underneath (joy). I take a sip to test the temperature and watch as the baby squirts her juice box all over the industrial cement floor. I go to get napkins before anyone slips on the puddle. How exactly, I wonder, is a 6 dollar  mocha supposed to fill my  life with joy? All it does is give me a stomach ache.

I am away from my babies when I hear about the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school. I am in my grandmother’s condo where the  ones my grandfather left are gathering together. We come to make sure that Grandma isn’t grieving alone….it is certainly convenient that this then makes us less alone. We try to talk about it quietly because there are babies in the room, my cousin Kim’s babies, who are old enough to hear but not understand. Maybe they should shoo me out of the room too. It seems I am not yet old enough to understand.

My sister gets in later that night and the three of us, John’s girls is generally how the family refers to us, are together and need to practice the hymn we are singing for Grandpa’s funeral.

This is my story, this is my song, praising my savior all the day lo-o-ong. 

The TV is muted, but the images are not and we are standing together singing about perfection, and rest, and being happy and blessed and loved and in our savior’s arms and there are stills of weeping mothers with empty arms flashing across the screen. Em can’t take it any more and weeps in the bathroom looking for tissues. I sing, broken and through my tears, and Jill demands that we not leave her hanging like that later in the church in front of everyone. We promise we won’t, we try hard to mean it.

I get back into my classroom and am suddenly very grateful that I have a windowless book room attached. I am also aware that my room has three potential entry points if the people on the other side forget to close the doors behind them. I make sure my key can lock those doors. I jump every time one of my students comes in or out, even if I told them too. The PTA president chokes up as she thanks us for what we do every day and I feel the weight of holding other people’s babes in my care. Even for an hour at a time, even when some of them look almost grown, they still belong to someone who would call them “my baby.”

I stand outside a Starbucks in New York City as we wait for the shuttle to La Guardia. I see the words on the window rekindle (joy). I am struck by just how ludicrous it is that someone would claim to sell joy. I am struck by how much I wish the claim were true. All my griefs mix together and settle into a cold, dull ache. I consider going inside for a peppermint mocha the size of my fore arm, but I already have the stomach ache.

I am longing for a joy the size of a venti peppermint mocha. One that is familiar and delicious. A joy I can hold in both hands and feel the warmth of it before I even consume it. This is not the joy I have this season. I can feel my heart longing and groaning for the joy that I am promised, praying desperately “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” I am clinging to the elusive sliver of the promise of joy, the promise that was bought in the savior incarnate, in the birth I am celebrating, in the promise I whisper “this is not the end.”

I light a tiny candle on my kitchen table for joy. I sing into the darkness even when I am sure it is pointless. I hug my babies and check to see that I can lock my doors. I cry with my grandmother. I look for the joy that Christ has promised despite all that is this world. I promise not to lose that joy. I try hard to mean it.