I especially love watching the rain coming down over all the green I see from here. I've been thinking about trees lately, because a week or so ago our neighbours had several trees majorly trimmed and a couple cut down. We were sad and happy at the same time. We lost a beautiful Pohutukawa that was just outside our kitchen window. We loved watching the birds come to suck the nectar out of the gorgeous red blooms, and we loved how it hid the neighbours' roof from view. Now we can see their roof clearly. We like our neighbours a lot, but a roof just a roof, if you know what I mean, it's certainly not a tree.
But the view from here at our dining table is so much better now. The trees on the boundary between them and us were pretty overgrown, and they blocked out a fair bit of our outlook. Now sitting here I can see all the way around. A wide view over our street and up to the houses and bush on the ridge above us. We have more view out the back too. Whereas before there was a thick flank of leaves blocking the sky, now there are open spaces, openness we can see through past the High School next door out to far off into the distance.
This is something I love. I love views from high places. I love seeing forever. I love looking out over layers, seeing past our neighbours to the houses and trees beyond. It does my soul good. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it's something about perspective. And right now perspective is exactly what I need. It's amazing what we humans can withstand if we have some perspective. It might be simply knowing that the season we are in has an end date, or it might be knowing that what we are doing is a job that will be finished... eventually. Or it might be knowing that there are other, more serious things going on beyond our own small world, and that we are not alone. Or it might be an other-worldly perspective we need, a somehow knowing that what we are going through will one day be a blink, not even a blink, when viewed from that unimaginable eternity. I don't know which of those perspectives I need most, but I'll take any of them. And right now, looking out at the grey rain drizzling down over green trees is good for my soul.
Actually, now I think about it, Advent is all about perspective. Advent is a reminder, if we let it be, that there is something, or someone, at the end of all our waiting. For all our longing for something better than we have, for that feeling we just can't shake that there must be more, for all our dissatisfactions and frustrations, all our cynicism and disbelief, Advent tells us there is something we are waiting for, something worth hoping for.
At church on Sunday I had the privelege of sharing some thoughts about Advent, and these were my words:
"Advent didn’t mean much to me until a year ago. And even then, my understanding was limited. This year somehow I’m starting to get it. Advent as the season, the five precious Sundays, the time of waiting expectantly, of preparing our homes and preparing our hearts. And Advent as a mirror into the future. Showing us that the waiting and preparing we do now, in this one tiny moment of now, is a reflection of the waiting and preparing we will do all our lives, in waiting for the greatest, most holy, most unimaginable Advent to come. The Advent we are all yearning for, groaning for even, as Romans 8 reminds us.
That's why I don't think there's any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what's coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.
All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it's not only around us; it's within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We're also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy. (Romans 8:18-25 The Message)
And so the obvious question now is simple. What are we waiting for? Last week we were given an image, a glimpse of what we are waiting for in the sense of the great Advent to come. But we don’t always know what we are waiting for in the now either. Are waiting for the craziness to be over? Are we waiting to eat turkey and open presents? Are we waiting for our summer holiday? And yet we know that is not what Christmas means to us. We know that it’s Jesus we are waiting for. We are waiting to celebrate his arrival. God’s arrival. That mind-blowing moment when our very creator and sustainer bursts onto the stage of our world and into our homes and hearts, as a baby. We are waiting for a baby!
This is how Catholic author and blogger Amy Welborn describes it.
“How can you prepare for that?
...The only way we can - the way that we’ve been given, the way that we live in a finite world aching for the infinite.
…Prepare to hold a baby.
Not in a closed room but in one with the windows and doors flung wide open so the mystery of God and His rising collapsing binding loosening transformed and transforming creation courses through and becomes the place you live with the One who made it all and made you to live there.
…Prepare to hold a baby.”
Most of us know about preparing for a baby. If we haven’t done it ourselves we’ve seen others around us planning, purchasing, gathering together all the paraphanalia that seems to go with a newborn. And we’ve caught their expectation, we’ve witnessed their growing excitement. And when that baby is due, when it’s “any day now” we don’t need to hear words to know how that pregnant woman is feeling. We can see it in her tired eyes, and in the unbelieveable hugeness of her aching, stretched belly. We think, she can’t possibly get any bigger, that baby has to come!
And even if you haven’t held a newborn of your own in your arms, you’ve seen one, you’ve held one awkwardly not sure if you might break it, you’ve held it in wonder, looking down at the tiniest nose and darkest eyes and been amazed that there in this bundle of warm skin, is an entire person.
And so it was with Jesus. Mary held her baby. And in her baby, in that tiny, fragile bundle of skin, was God.
What are we waiting for?
We are waiting for a baby."
And today I remind myself that. I give myself that perspective. There is so much more to my life than what I can see with my own eyes. This one moment I am in will pass. There is something coming that is better, more perfect, more beautiful than anything I can imagine... something worth waiting for, worth hoping in. I watch the rain still persisting down, softening the hard and cracked ground, and I feel it raining inside me, softening my heart, turning all my dry despondency into hope.
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I love what you say about perspective. I feel the same way about views from high places. I used to spend so much time staring out the upstairs windows at my parents' house. Not that the view was really all that spectacular. But there's something about being up in the tree tops, looking down at things. I miss that now living in a single level house. Perhaps some day we may be able to have a two-story house and I can once again look out the windows from upstairs and feel that sense of perspective.
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