Faces on Faith: Preparing your heart for love
My wife, Linda, and I have very different approaches to preparing for a trip. I am a real last-minute sort-of-guy. The night before we leave, sometimes even an hour or two ahead of our departure time, I am running around the house gathering up my clothes, shoes, books electronic devices, shaving kit and medications and cramming it all into the smallest suitcase I can find.
Linda, on the other hand, is very methodical, and often begins packing days, sometimes even a week or more, ahead of time. She sets out little piles of clothes, making sure she has just the right number of blouses, often with matched slacks, shoes that she thinks she’ll need, pajamas, make-up, her books and on and on. In time everything finds its way into the biggest suitcase we own, all carefully arranged – outfits with matching jewelry, usually stacked in the order it will be worn.
In other words, Linda plans well head, and in great detail, I don’t. So, who usually ends up without a sweatshirt when we’re going north – or missing a pen for journaling – or not quite enough pairs of socks to make it through the time away. Right. Me.
It turns out that preparation is essential to having a successful journey. For old Ben Franklin was right, “Failing to prepare, is preparing to fail.”
Advent, friends, is a whole season of preparation. It is a three- or four-week journey, devoted to making ready for the birth of Christ. (This year it began on Sunday, Dec. 2, and runs through Dec. 24.)
Now when you prepare to celebrate someone’s birthday you probably go out and buy some presents. You bake a special cake and light some candles. You sing a song especially written for birthdays. You probably get a card or two. And most likely you hang some decorations, a few balloons, some streamers, whatever.
And so, it is during Advent as we prepare for Christmas. We buy presents – mostly gift cards these days, but presents nonetheless. We bake special cakes and cookies. (Although there is a rumor that there is really just one fruitcake in the whole world that keeps getting passed along from one person to another.) We have candles that we light every Sunday. We send out cards. We even decorate – everything from nativity scenes to blow-up Santas. Yes, when it comes to celebrating the birth of Jesus, we do all the usual stuff to get ready – and we do it during Advent, the season of preparation for celebrating the birth of Christ.
While all of those things are fun, even at some level important, they are not the preparations that really matter. For you see, Advent is really about preparing our hearts.
You see, for Christians, Advent, is about our getting ready, our preparing, our cleaning up our act, so to speak, so that we will be able to welcome Christ into our hearts. For if we hold grudges, if we need to make amends, if we are harboring hatred, if we are bathed in bitterness and resentment, how can there be room love?
Because Advent isn’t so much about prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus as it is preparing for the actual birth itself. It is about acknowledging the broken relationships in our lives and preparing for the spirit of love manifested in Jesus, to be rekindled in our hearts. For in this time of hatred and division, most of us have a broken relationship or two in our lives. And Advent calls on us to be honest about that reality.
I’m not real big on preparing for those trips my wife and I take – though I do love the trips! But Advent, while sometimes a real challenge, is my favorite season of the church year. If you are among those who observe it, might it be a time of preparing your heart for love!
The Rev. Dr. John H. Danner is the senior pastor at Sanibel Congregational United Church of Christ.