repeat the sounding joy

Home from carpool, I pull the wet, clean clothes from our washer and toss them, with a shake, into the dryer.  I can hear Riley in the kitchen, her voice bright and morning-new, counting to Christmas. 

“Just 18 more,” she says, with enthusiasm, but I push the button on the machine and lose the rest of her words to the rumble.

In my mind, I can see her standing there in her bare feet and rumpled pajamas, her lips still puffed with sleep, a kind of wild dazzle lighting her eyes.

On the way home from school, I had counted miles down leaf-strewn roads; I had counted minutes left weaving my way through traffic.  I had counted days left until Christmas break, deliberately forcing my shoulders down and away from my ears.

Riley counts her way to the celebration of everything.

For weeks now, she has started every day anticipating Christmas.  She counts both ways—days and “sleeps.”  She counts gifts in their wrapped stacks.  She counts Christmas cards as they trickle in through the mail.  She keeps her accounting of joy with an unencumbered and undying enthusiasm.  It is her own unique celebration of Advent.

I wander back downstairs, counting the steps as I take them, counting the signs of my own outward crumbling.  Right now, I count three—a certain heaviness in my legs, an ache in my knees, a cramp stretching through my tender feet—all of which point to a mounting exhaustion I hadn’t yet acknowledged. 

“I love Christmas,” Riley says when I walk into the kitchen.

This of course comes as no surprise to me.  No one in my life excels at looking forward like Riley does, especially to someone’s coming.  Advent, from the Latin ‘advenire’, means coming, and adventure, from the same root, means something about to happen, and Riley’s adventures almost always involve the advent of someone she loves.  Why should she not anticipate the coming King the way she anticipates everyone else?  The adventure of Christmas is the advent of Christ.

In fact, this is most often the first thing our friends love about Riley.  “I like to come over just because she’s always so excited to see me,” someone said recently.  Somehow, just in the way Riley greets our friends at the door, they can imagine that she has anticipated their coming, noting the date and rehearsing it with us for days, repeatedly telling me, “I just can’t wait to see them.”

“I know you do,” I say to her now, smiling as I count the dishes that have been left this morning in the sink.  Three bowls.  Two plates.  One ice cream scoop.  Why do they leave their dishes in the sink?

But I am counting the wrong kind of evidence.  I realize this as the warm water runs over my fingers, as Riley puts a pill on her tongue and swallows it down with a drink from a cup.  Instead, I should keep an accounting of joy, a record of grace upon grace already given.  Our lives and our bellies are full; we are together and not alone; we are able to give.  In five minutes, I have not had one thought that did not at its heart overflow from the reality of God’s generosity.

I learn like a child, again and again and again, how to choose joy, how to watch for Christ and mark his progress, how to receive and unwrap blessings instead of counting the balls of gift wrap we toss into the trash.

I remember our early days with Autism, when we had to teach Riley to receive gifts.  She would cry out every time she tore some wrapping paper, pulling it off in tiny pieces, weeping over each one as she watched it fall from her fingers and drift to the floor.  By the time we got to the gift inside, Riley had completely exhausted herself and couldn’t enjoy it.  Back then, she felt so confused and frustrated she had no room for anticipating anything good, and at the time, I would never have thought her capable of the kind of joy she experiences now.  Time and again, her life reminds me not to give up on God, who through the prophet Isaiah described Christ’s coming as, “a shoot coming from the stump of Jesse.”  No one expects new life to spring forth from a dead tree.

From the kitchen, I can hear Riley narrating her search for Noelle, our elf-on-the-shelf, and for Noelle’s reindeer, Tinsel.

“Let’s see…what are they doing today?” Riley’s voice sounds like a magical mixture of thoughtfulness and wonder.  In all her counting, she sounds like resounding re-sounding re-joy-ing joy, the kind Paul called superabundantly abounding, the kind a modern worship song calls “grace on repeat.”  Joy is the counting of grace, and joy is the counting that makes everything count.

Let’s see…what are you doing today, Lord?  Now that’s something to notice.  This is the way that washing dishes becomes worship.

Make me innocent, so I never tire of anticipating you. 

 “I found them!” Riley calls out now.  I hear her footsteps against the floor as she comes to find me, to share with me a bit of the fun I have created for her.  “Mom Jones?  I found Noelle and Tinsel!  They’re in the living room, trying to look inside one of the presents!”  She laughs, and her laughter is the music of joy, and I think, Isn’t it a bit like this?  When I thank God for His good grace?  Am I not God’s lavishly loved child, running to announce the things He’s done for me, the gifts He’s been waiting for me to find?

I imagine He beams indulgently, the way our parents always have when we open up our gifts and run to show them what they’ve given us.

“Look!” We say, and they nod, the way I do now, and say, “Isn’t it wonder-ful?”

“Yes, it is, Mom,” Riley says, her eyes wide.  “Christmas is almost here.”