Advent Word - December 5 - #raise - “We’re waiting on something that’s already happened.”

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.

I joked in my Instagram post for today that I like to put up Christmas lights to lower our property value so that the city doesn't raise my taxes, but the reality is that it's just one more way to bring a little light into these days when it gets so dark so early. I've always got plans to do something really tacky with them, but I never get to it because there's only so many free weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we'd rather enjoy them for a few weeks instead of being tired from putting up too many. 

Maybe next time.

I used to try to be a stickler for Advent (and liturgically, I think I still am), but with two kids and a wife who LOVE Christmas and want to start listening to Christmas music before All Saints Day, there's no way I'm going to be able to hold off on putting a Christmas tree up any later than the first weekend of December. I've also learned, though, that life is too short and the kids grow up too fast for me to be a stick in the mud about it. If you've ever seen someone get scolded by the Advent Police online for enjoying Christmas before December 25, you see it's not a real flattering look.

You see, in Advent we're waiting on something that's already happened, and we're looking forward to something that we hope for in the future. That is, we're waiting for the celebration of Christmas and we're anticipating the Second Advent. One of them, we know is coming soon. And the other, we wait patiently for just as our Jewish brothers and sisters wait patiently for Elijah. Part of that waiting is preparation, and whether those sticklers out there like it or not, part of the preparation is putting up the lights early because, y'all, the light has already broken in, and sometimes it's an overpriced strand of LEDs that help us remember that.