The gift of doing without is that it can enable us to see how full we actually are–and as emptiness is filled, each drop is full of richness and light. 

 I know I’m sick when I don’t want to take photos or eat; I know something is amiss when I go out to eat at a northern New Mexico restaurant and order chicken soup instead of blue corn cheese enchiladas.  

Her diagnosis?  With the severe cold (below zero since I started traveling last Thursday) along with altitude change from Houston (49 feet) to Bend (3700 feet) to Denver (mile high) to Taos (7000 feet) plus coming on this trip worn out from this past autumn, I had a good dose of altitude sickness.    

One of my daily devotionals for Advent is one written by Jan Richardson with her husband Gary,  “Illuminated  2013:  An online journey into the heart  of Christmas.”  In today’s blessing there is a line: for the older woman who “feels in her flesh the measure of her days.”

When we are younger, we look back on our lives and delight in all of the things we used not to be able to do that now we can. There’s another point in our lives, if we are given the gift of years, that we are aware of the things we used to do but now can’t. 

                                       

This itinerary of  Advent travel would have been little challenge a few years ago, but this year it has laid me flat. However, I find myself not grieving this change. I can float and dance with the things that I can’t do and be aware of the many gifts of life that God continues to pour down on me. 

Meanwhile, I have a beautiful place to rest and my best friend has fetched me bland foods. It is really too cold to spend much time outside, and we have a tablefull of crafts we brought to do. I am hour by hour feeling better and the slower pace is most appropriate for an Advent rest of waiting. 

In a little bit we’ll drive to a potter friend’s for tea and tomorrow it will be warmer. This may not be the trip we’d planned but it is perfect for today. 

On my way for Jonas’ #1, I’m over half way through a seven hour layover at the Denver airport. Thankfully thankfully thankfully I had a pass for the United Lounge with comfortable chairs and free snacks and wifi.

Working on pictures and music; praying for those I love. It’s 70 degrees colder here than when I left Houston. Putting my Advent wreath on my front door before I left, I had to swat the mosquitoes away. Now all I see outside the window is snow.

The word for today on one of my iPhone Advent devotionals is:

Rest

Julia on Norwich said,  “The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God, knowing that that goodness can reach down to our lowest depths of need.”

And Brother Curtis said on the SSJE Advent Word for the Day, which today is Desire:

Listen to your desire. Our capacity to desire is God-given. No matter how flimsy our desires, no matter how conflicted or shadowy or duplicitous or even wrong our desires may be on the surface, they are connected to something deep within our souls that really demands attention, and that is good.

If you want to hear what The Rev. Barbara Crafton has to say on this first Thursday in Advent, you can follow this link.

This past August,  I was in Oregon for my grandson’s third birthday.

By the time we’re three, we are really, really excited about our birthdays and the gifts and the cakes and the party.  My grandson was no exception.

The morning of his birthday, and of his party day, too, he and his mom made birthday cupcakes.

I was looking at the photos of their cupcake baking, and was struck by how very, very present my grandson was in the task of making cupcakes. He wasn’t focused on the birthday party or the presents or even eating the cupcakes later that day. He was completely engrossed in each step of the cake baking as if all he had to do in the world was to bake cupcakes with his mom.

There is probably no other time in the year than in these days before Christmas when we have more distractions–certainly at least as many as a three year old on his birthday.  During Advent we have an opportunity to reframe those distractions and to approach them, live them, from a place of being fully present for the unexpected joy that God loves to pour down on each of us.  Of having nothing more important in our lives than finding God in the present ordinary moment.

It’s being like a three year old making birthday cupcakes.  Not eyes focused on the seemingly bigger events later in the day (or the week or the month), but on whatever moment God has placed in our lives at the very present time.  When we do, when we are, we will sooner or later be surprised by joy.

And we might even get to lick the bowl.