joy, to the world
“What’s your favorite thing about Christmas?”
One of the second graders stands in front of me, twisting slightly on her toes, downy soft ponytail swinging, light as air, behind her.
“Ummm,” she says, buying time, looking skyward as though rummaging for something in her mind.
As the kids walk in for worship, I ask them this for fun, just for conversation, and because we have begun to actively remember Advent together.
I came in this morning humming something God has brought me fresh this year by way of Hillsong, the chorus of their song, Arrival, the grandest kind of re-gifting:
Oh, come now hail His arrival
The God of creation
Royalty robed in the flesh He created
Jesus the Maker has made Himself known
All hail the infinite infant God
The song might as well be called Advent, because the word ‘advent’, which is derived from the Latin adventus, means ‘arrival’ or ‘coming’. I arrive singing of His Arrival and the kids arrive, and I ask them, “What’s your favorite thing about Christmas?”
Their compulsive honesty is one of my favorite things.
The best celebration of Christmas actively practices at the end of one year the Truth that can take us straight through the next, that God stripped Himself of the richness and power of heaven and put on all our vulnerability; that He, the creator of bodies, came running for us, learning to crawl and then to walk on chunky baby legs. My everlasting King was also once only seven-years-old and yay tall, because He chose it. A phrase of a friend’s prayer has marinated my mind: You could have saved us quickly, but you chose to grow from a child.
“It’s scandalous and weird, if you think about it,” another friend of mine said recently. “We need to let it be weird so that we can retrieve our awe from wherever it is that we lost it.”
I’m thinking about all this as I wait on the mini friend standing in front of me, as she rummages through her mind, and suddenly, I realize that Advent looks like this for most of us, this twisting on our toes, this awkward reaching for the meaning. Here also, another thing God keeps pointing to for me, that Christ, King of Heaven and Earth, chose a presentation in every way ordinary and unassuming, as are we all, from the beginning. He chose the wide eyes, the downy hair.
I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking that I can’t be the only one for whom this season hurtles, and if the facilitation of the holiday for my people isn’t enough of a distraction for me, my body insists on groaning louder the closer I get to the end of the year. It can all be quite deafening, blinding me in a flash, except that the Shepherd of my heart is good, and He would have me twisting on my toes in front of Him, paused just to enjoy a relationship with Him. For me, the only way this season of Arrival becomes a lifetime of waiting, Anna and Simeon-style, with hope, is the Way the good Shepherd leads, always pointing, this is the way, walk here, walk here, just here. But here I am again, rummaging.
“I think…the gifts,” little girl finally says, meeting my eyes, gushing those last two words like she’s thinking, I know I should say something better, but there it is.
That song still meanders along in my head.
The One who holds the stars
In the creases of His hands
Is the One who holds my heart
I smile at my mini friend, only now just the tiniest young seed of a woman, and nod, softly confessing, “I like the gifts too.”
Grace, His hands holding my heart, that’s the only way I now know He’s actually the gift, all the gifts.
In Ann Voskamp’s book, The Greatest Gift, which I read yearly as part of Advent, I flipped the page this week to read that joy, that awareness of God’s grace, is the gift we open every day, again and again and again. It’s true, every day it’s like a new surprise, the grandest re-gifting.
Little girl gives me a sideways grin and drifts away as another of my mini friends arrives.
“What’s your favorite thing about Christmas?” I ask him, delighting in the glossy bowl cut, the melting chocolate brown eyes, the way his mouth quirks on one side as he thinks.
“I think family,” he says quickly.
“How wonderful. Do you get to spend Christmas with a house full of family?”
He hesitates, biting his bottom lip a little, tilting back on his little boy feet. Faintly, he murmurs something, but I can’t quite hear. I lean down a little closer to him.
“Maybe breakfast,” He finally says at full volume.
“Breakfast? Cool. What do you get to eat for breakfast on Christmas Day?”
He purses his lips, starts shaking that head, those bangs.
“No. Nothing special,” He mumbles. “I really don’t know,” he says, this last drifting, like smoke, because he’s already walking away.
It can be a chore really, trying to get the answers just right, but in fact, Advent isn’t about having the right answers. Instead, I’m pretty sure it’s about knowing we had all the wrong ones, and knowing that still He came for us, as one of us.
I turn back to the door in time to greet another mini friend, a second-grade boy in an oxford shirt and khaki’s, who walks in with his hands stuffed in his pockets. Those pockets look so small my phone wouldn’t even fit in them. He looks up at me, sky-eyed, his hair wet-combed to one side, poking up in short baby spikes around the part.
“Hi, Evan,” I say, and he nods. “So, tell me, what’s your favorite thing about Christmas?”
He jingles a bit of change in his pocket with his fingers, the movement jerking his pant leg up, up, up, until I can see the top of one navy blue sock hugging his leg.
“The joy that Jesus brings,” he says simply, immediately, and I look deep, because sometimes we learn the things to say and sometimes, we feel the Father’s hand in our own, and we know. The words can come from very different places. He blinks, waiting on me, those sky eyes still and careful, and I can’t find a trace of rehearsal in him, only certainty. It doesn’t always take years and years to figure out what’s real, but admittedly it’s weird to hear it coming from someone so small.
Can you imagine? Seven-year-old Jesus must have blinked up at ancient scholars who thought they knew, Truth standing there wearing a little boy body, moving like a funny little boy, talking like the Word in a little boy voice.
The joy that Jesus brings.
Yes, I’m thinking, silently continuing an otherworldly conversation. I’ve been hearing you about that joy.
At thirty-three, at the end of His ministry, Jesus would tell His disciples, “I’ve said all this to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” He came bringing joy, determined that we all get a full view of grace, and in His last hours with His disciples before the cross, He prepared them for His departure, for the trouble coming, for what He would do for the joy set before Him, that our joy might be complete.
I bend down toward Evan, determined to say it so he can hear, “That’s my favorite answer yet.”
He smiles, a wonky little second-grade smile, then walks off toward a game of four square, toward all the other little boys wiggling in a jaunty line, their grins recklessly wide, their hair escaping its careful combing, refusing to behave.
