Slo Mo Christmas

 

If there were special effects to put to what this first week back feels like for me, it would be me in the middle of a wintry scene with lights and Christmas trees and warm fires, and a whole lot of happy people fast-forwarding past me.  There’s a hum of excited chatter, but the conversations are lost in the blur, while I move ever so slowly in the same direction, just -- really, really slow.  Sounds are muted, reactions delayed, everything is slightly out of focus.

 

Whatever Christmas ‘feels’ like, I’m not there yet.  I’m somewhere way back here.

 

Usually I’m at ‘put up the tree early’ kind of girl.  Get out the cards in November.  Have the shopping mostly done long before this.  These traditions guard against me finding myself in my least favourite quadrant of life as described by Steven Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  That would be  quadrant 1, where everything is urgent and important at the same time.  A space Christmas can often provoke.  A space, for me, to be avoided as much as possible.

 

And usually I want the beautiful things of Christmas to be ready and all around me for as much time as I can squeeze out of the season.  Because the specialized environment itself provokes a hushed kind of worship reserved for the waiting of Advent.  That space is one I want to live in, as much as possible.

 

But not this year.

 

I’m not freaking out, not frenzied.  At least not yet.  The jet lag is providing something of a buffer against all the pressures, real and invented.  The jet lag is the slo mo effect. 

 

Or maybe it’s just how this whole fall season has been one big push up until now.  And now it’s not.  And I have so much abundance to unpack that I can’t let the normal Christmas preparations, and my high expectations of how it’s all supposed to look and feel, rob me of the way this is so utterly beautiful just as it is.

 

It’s as if I’ve been dropped back into the Christmas season spent but well-spent; unprepared but ready, moving slowly but thinking I’ll arrive just on time.  Maybe I’m even ahead of the game. 

 

If “Emmanuel” means “God with us” then I’ve been in Christmas mode for months already.  I would do wrong to keep silent of all the abundance of His presence, all the ways He’s been so very ‘with’ me, carrying me, encouraging me, holding me, healing me through this entire fall season up to now. 

 

Perhaps its not just the jet lag that has me in slo mo.  It’s that I’m being forced by the sheer enormity of it to revel in every remembrance of the Spirit’s intimate interactions in each redemptive day since I last stepped out of the kayak early in September.  And come to think of it, maybe the special effects are just a way of helping me stay in a strong and quiet place of worship this Christmas season.

 

I’m not rushing it.  

Just trying to stay quiet enough in it. 

Here in my slo mo Christmas.

 

“From our sins and fears release us

Let us find our rest in Thee”

== Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

Charles Wesley