As I embark upon this Substack adventure, I find myself at the crossroads of a rather unique time of year. Thanksgiving has passed, but it is not yet Advent.
And yet, this post isn’t about particular holidays, it’s about the condition of our soul and spirit. Gratitude is a posture, one which is more difficult to find sometimes, but one which will align our spiritual spinal cord in a way that few other things will. As for waiting—well, waiting is inevitable. In fact, we are continually waiting. The Church calendar may only have it four weeks a year, but we eternally walk through an Advent of the soul.
With that in mind, then, I encourage you to keep reading, whatever time of year you may find yourself reading this.
A Time To Give Thanks
There are understandably a lot of mixed feelings when it comes to Thanksgiving. I readily accept those, and I don’t think this day of gratitude should pass without also acknowledging a certain sense of mourning that necessarily accompanies it.
November is Native American Heritage Month, a month which has become necessity due to the erasure—beginning with genocide and continued through displacement and governmental policy—of our land’s first nations. I, for one, am writing to you from the lands of the Comanche, Hueco, Tawakoni, and Wichita people, who have stewarded and cared for the land on which I live and work.
This acknowledgment, however, is only a first step. Land acknowledgments are important work, but they must be a mere part of an ongoing effort toward equity and anti-racism, not the culmination.
Despite this, however, I happen to love Thanksgiving, a holiday that centers gratitude above all else. In my personal practice, I have separated out what may be considered ‘historical’ Thanksgiving from the ‘practice’ of Thanksgiving. For me, this holiday serves as an annual reminder of what it truly means to gather around a table, sharing labors of love with those you love.
This year, more than most years even, as Thanksgiving approached, the world felt so broken. Wars continue to rage in Ukraine and in Palestine. I’ve spoken once of genocide already, and I would be remiss not to mention it once more. We are living in the midst of genocide even as I write, and the atrocities being committed are horrifying, to say the very least.
Yet, we can be grateful. Thanksgiving Day arrived, and even in the midst of horror, the sun still rose and painted the sky with pinks and oranges, the leaves still changed color in autumnal splendor, the squirrels still scampered across the lawn, the Thanksgiving food still filled the house with the tantalizing aroma of the meal to come, and the list goes on.
Each day, not only Thanksgiving, arrives with a myriad of blessings all its own, should we but choose to take notice. And that isn’t to say we should ignore the horror. On the contrary. But gratitude is a means by which we can keep the horror from paralyzing us where we stand. From a posture of gratitude, we can more readily and lovingly do something about all the wrong in the world. When we ourselves are thankful, we find ourselves longing for all people to be in a place where they can more easily see the blessings of each day, rather than the atrocities of humanity.
This morning, I woke up, and my dog did the adorable stretch that she does every morning, her rear lifted in the air as her front paws slid forward along the floor, emitting a noise somewhere between a yawn and a squeal. After her stretch, her whole booty wiggled (she’s a corgi, so there’s no tail; instead of wagging, it’s just a wiggle).
As I went about my morning routine, I felt the joy of hot water splashing over my body in the shower. The world awoke me with chilly breezes blowing across my face as I stood on my front porch. One of my favorite local coffeshops, where I now write, has released their winter menu, and I’m enjoying my first peppermint bark mocha of the season. I’m writing. It’s my favorite thing to do, and thanks to you and your support, I have more time to do exactly that.
And as I write from this posture of immense gratitude, I find myself willing to take some small action that I otherwise might not. I write about the stolenness of the land I enjoy each day and of the genocide taking place against our fellow humans in another part of the world, and you know, that’s not what I once imagined this first newsletter to be about. But I’m writing about gratitude, and I truly believe that we have to understand the world in order to be grateful for our place in it.
Gratitude, at its core, is a choice. We can choose to walk through our days focused on the infinitely good gifts that surround us, or we can be blinded by the brokenness of the world. And while I never want to be blind to the world’s brokenness, I never want to be overcome by it. And gratitude is the perfect way by which to ensure that.
A Time to Wait (Even If We Don’t Want To)
But Thanksgiving is over, and we now look ahead to Advent, a season of waiting.
Waiting sucks, right? Like wow, is there anything worse?
Yet Advent is a time for us to treasure the waiting. We wait in eager anticipation for the Messiah to arrive. (He already has, but in this season, we await His coming anew, a reminder that His past arrival has an eternally present impact.)
If your parents were anything like mine, perhaps you also heard countless nuggets of passed-down wisdom. One of the classics is “good things come to those who wait.”
Even now, my knee-jerk reaction is often something along the lines of “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” And yet… there’s a lot of truth in those frustrating words.
Advent is a time of year that reminds us of the sacredness of the in-between and the not-yet. We can look ahead to Christmas with certainty, knowing that God Who Saves is an imminent reality, while simultaneously recognizing that this most beautiful of realities isn’t here yet.
I consider my faith journey, and recognize this truth over and over and over.
When I left my ex-husband, I found myself in a season of Advent. I knew the reality of divorce and ultimate freedom was imminent, but I wasn’t there yet. But it was in this in-between that I began rediscovering the ways that God had seen me through a marriage that at one time I had blamed God for. Even in the not-yet of waiting for divorce, there were people ready to surround and celebrate me as I learned how to step back into my own power.
When I decided to write my book, I found myself in season after season of Advent (Advent-ception, you might say). The writing was a beautiful journey, but it wasn’t the most beautiful reality of a completed manuscript. Once completed, I had a book, and it felt incredible, but it wasn’t the most beautiful reality of having a publisher. Even once a publisher was acquired, I felt like I had scaled the most unattainable mountain, and yet it still wasn’t the most beautiful reality of having real copies in the hands of real people.
This particular in-between, this Advent of waiting for real copies of real books, is where I still find myself. But it is in this in-between that I have the space to consider where God is leading me, what I want my ministry to look like beyond the book, and how astoundingly grateful I am for the people who made the completion of this project possible. Plus, this newsletter may never have existed without this not-yet space that gave me permission to further dream.
The trick is to find a way to enjoy the beauty inherent in the waiting. To be grateful for these in-betweens, as it is here that we often most grow.
And that is why, in this interesting time of year in which Thanksgiving has passed but Advent has not yet arrived, I find myself grateful to be waiting to wait. How’s that for crazy.
Psalm 130:5-6 proclaims:
“I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope.
I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning.”
May Advent be a time of year where our whole being waits. May our body, mind, and spirit wait in unified anticipation, resting in the in-between. In fact, may we strive to live in that part of the morning where darkness is creeping back into the shadows but the sun has not yet broken the horizon.
What are you waiting for with eager anticipation? And what lessons are waiting for you in the midst of it? What dawn are you presently looking toward?
Closing With A Poem
A forestful of trees.
Can a forestful be a
Proper unit of measurement?
Colorful leaves float
Down and around,
Winds disconnecting them
From branch abodes above.
A rainbow of fluttering rain
Shakily painting the air
With reds, browns, golds.
Other trees: full and green.
Evergreens ever-resolute,
Bearing witness to the change,
Though not submitting to it.
A forestful contains both,
A reminder of my soul—
Changing beyond recognition
While remaining steadfast.
Evolution and continuity
Hold hands here.
Both are beautiful.
The forest—the soul—
Needs both to thrive.
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