Advent Word - December 11 - #confess

The "Advent Word" practice is a daily meditation on a given word and an opportunity to share that reflection on social media with others who are keeping this practice. It's akin to an Advent calendar, but with many boxes to open on a given day. Sometimes the reflections are sincere, and sometimes they're a little silly, but at the end of the day, it's a practice set aside to help us observe the season of Advent in the midst of the world's busyness. With all of that in mind, this is going to be my attempt to observe the Advent Word practice. I wish I could promise a reflection every day, and we'll see where this goes together.

My wife and I started our annual rewatch of Lord of the Rings tonight. It's one of our traditions to put it on and watch the extended editions over the course of a week or 10 days (half of each movie a night, leading to needing six nights to watch it). We do this because we saw them initially around the holidays when we were in college. And the holidays, of course, are often about marking time and traditions.

I'll confess that I am sometimes a Grinch about following this particular tradition. It's about 90 minutes of movie a night, sometimes closer to two hours. I'm already tired, and since I'm so familiar with them all by now, it's so easy to doze off and fall asleep, which in turn makes me grumpy. However, there is something about being so familiar with these movies that allows us to make time to watch them and still have a our regular conversations. These movies are part of our tradition around here, and we make space for them so that we can also have our time with each other.

We've all got traditions and rituals that we keep. Some of them we keep begrudgingly, and some of them we keep because they connect us to something bigger (as we move through Advent and draw closer to Christmas, this will likely come up again for me here). Our opportunity, I think to see what those traditions might be and see how the continue to shape us as individuals and as people who are a part of a something larger. And as I wrote about the trees earlier this week, the keeping of traditions, be they at home or with family or in church, also help us to welcome others into the fold, giving them a place and opportunity to claim their spot as a member of the group.