Church Seasons: Post Script

While I truly love the mystery of Christmas and Easter, I find meaning for the church in Pentecost, I enjoy the seasons of preparation in Advent and Lent, by about May every year, we have been through the major Church Event...especially when you consider that Christmas in December is really in a NEW CHURCH CALENDAR year (even as it is the dwindling days of our usual way of telling time).  This means that for well over half the year, six months, we are in what the church calendar calls, "ordinary".  This means God does God's usual work in the midst of the mundane, ordinary, every day.  While we love the music of Christmas and the trumpets of Easter; while I enjoy the preparation of Advent and Lent, the church seasons proclaim that most of the time God shows up not in special Sundays, but normal, every day life.  That is a profound theological statement that is preached to us by the liturgical, church seasons.  We need to be reminded of that daily.  Of course, usually these ordinary, normal days are not exactly when the church is packed.  But, that is okay too.  What God longs for is relationship in the ordinary, not just the beauty and pageantry of the most sacred days.  I think about weddings, those are great events and life changing...but marriages are lived in the ordinary when the dishes are piling up and you are just trying to get dinner on the table.  I think about starting new jobs, the excitement and energy...but careers are lived in the ordinary day to day of completing assignment.  First date...the same...relationships are lived in the ordinary and every day.

So, after we live half a year jammed packed with special events, we live the second half in the ordinary.

What might that say to us?

This is where I find my life taking shape and form.  I find God in the ordinary.  In dinners shared as a family.  In preparing lunch for my kids for school.  In texts exchanged with my wife.  Which is also where we might look for the hope, peace, joy, and love of Advent to be found as we enter into December.  Maybe it is not in pyrotechnics and magical moments.  Maybe hope moves quietly and in the still small silence.  Same with peace, sitting in darkness listening to carols.  Same with love, a hug at just the right time.  Same with joy, in simply unwrapping a present given with love.

The ordinary becomes extraordinary is true not only in church seasons, but also throughout scripture.  In the end, that is really where we sense the traces of God's grace.

Blessings ~