Happy Advent!
2020 began with me assuming that the year’s biggest event would be February 13 when I turned 40. Only God knew how wrong I would be! Unlike some people, I am not uneasy about sharing my age. Aging is a fact of life to embrace, not be embarrassed about. At the tender age of 81, novelist Ursula K. Lee Guin started a blog that eventually morphed into the book, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. Her words represent where I am: “Erase my age, you erase my life—me.” For someone characterized as having an old soul for a long time now, 40 feels more comfortable to me than 16 or 25 ever did. As a 1980’s little girl, while school friends were falling in love with Janet Jackson’s choreography from her groundbreaking “Rhythm Nation” music video, I was mesmerized by Shirley Caesar’s song, “Jesus I Love Calling Your Name,” running around the house trying to sing like her. Even today, I depend on my Millennial girlfriends and younger Gen Z spiritual sisters to help me understand social media and nuances of the latest memes, popular culture, how my cell phone is supposed to work, and basically anything else relevant to technology.
I am excited every year for my birthday these days just like I was decades ago when the first day of school arrived. I always loved school and still for me, a “perfect” day starts and ends curled up on the couch with a good book. An even more perfect day, however, must include good coffee and ice cream. Even so, surreal as it is, starting a new decade of life has served as an alert of sorts, to hold tightly to the joyful experience of Christ continuing to meet me over, and over, and over again. Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” anthem (written as a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.) is great, of course, but these days I find the hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” more appropriate. It acknowledges my smallness in the world while highlighting how appropriate it is to maintain a huge reliance on Jesus, who will not bypass my trauma and grief, but instead will free me to scale the next mountains on the journey. I remain excited to steward my redemption story well here on earth, while yearning for Christ’s second coming.
Before the global lock-down began earlier this year, I definitely was not anticipating any drastic changes, but I suppose change is always a moment away whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. Although my faith has grown during the pandemic, I have a long way to go. I recognize that being nimble enough to repeatedly adjust, and readjust, will be a way of life amid some relationships that remain fragile and fractured, but in the sacred space between already but not yet, there is the blessed assurance of hope’s prophesy. In Jeremiah 29:11, the Lord declared to his newly exiled people that his plans were not to harm them, but to give them hope and a future, to prosper them—and he intends the same for me, for whoever trusts him. I embrace each breath the Almighty blows into my lungs as a precious gift, one I do not deserve and yet fully accept and hold onto with confidence.
My four decades of existence are book-ended by Reaganomincs and an era of Trumpism that has come to an end, at least for now. Between all this, I vividly recall processing the groundbreaking news of our first African American president being elected, as well as learning while sitting in my dorm room on September 11, 2011 of the terrorism that was being unleashed on American soil. It would be that in the same year Facebook launched, I moved to Washington, DC, which unbeknownst to me paved the way for me to sooner than later take the leap of faith into becoming a wife. Over time, hairstyles have changed, my palate has expanded, and my waist size has fluctuated more than once, but that is how life goes. These are the ways of the world, of the human experience. As COVID continues wreaking havoc the globe over, and we pray for an intervention to it, the truth doesn’t change: God is not only the Creator of life, but the author and finisher of my specific story. Even when I foolishly try to outrun Him, falling victim to a bogus narrative, He brilliantly edits those contrary pages to draw me back. When I call on the unrivaled, strong name of Jesus, whether in jubilation or groaning, I know he hears me and advocates for me better than I can for myself, as he sits at the right hand of God the Father, and so it is in the weary winter wonder of waiting that I worship and rejoice.