A quiet table

I had grand plans. I've lived at No41 for over a year now and I'm ashamed to say I still don't know my neighbors very well. I'm grateful for the quiet apartment community I live in. But the quiet is paired with a reserved quality to interactions on the sidewalks and walkways. I value opportunities to have people around my table and hear their stories, what inspires them and what makes them ache. So to not know the people I share a laundry room with seems counterintuitive. This Christmas was going to be different. An open house I thought! Take a break from holiday shopping and come share a plate of pasta at No41. It was a perfect opportunity. People expect that kind of thing at Christmas. Come January and I might get weird looks at such an invitation.

December has a way of altering plans. "It's going around" came around to me just days before Christmas. I'm a terrible sick person. No really. This independent woman turns into a girl who wants her mommy to come make her headache go away and her tummy feel better. I find myself wondering how I will ever be a capable mother if I can't handle being sick by myself. Needless to say I took off my apron and exchanged it for fuzzy socks and a few doses of DayQuil.

The exciting days leading up to Christmas become a different celebration, a quieter one. My mind switches off the high speed track it's been shooting down for months and ambles along on a deserted (i.e. drugged) road. And as many minds do at this time of year, mine wanders to the Nativity scene. In the three decades I've spent in church, I must have heard most perspectives on each of the characters we see in the scene. What I love most is how absolutely ordinary each of those people were. As I sit here blowing my nose, I wonder if any of them had a cold that night. Was the solemnity we superimpose onto that night broken by sneezes and coughs? Because that's our reality, isn't it? Bodies that are broken, that ache, that remind us how fragile life is.

And that reality makes the wonder of Christmas palpable. That night wasn't more perfect than other nights. Dirt and germs and fear didn't get whisked away in the sacred yellow glow that colors our imaginations. The sacredness was Emmanuel, God with us - in human flesh. Quite honestly, that's a ridiculous scenario - the God who created the universe covered in amniotic fluid. Why on earth would He choose that scenario (pun intended)? As my dear friend Nick Benoit wrote in his Christmas piece "Wonder"...

"You have a God who believes that you are massively significant. He cries it from every metaphorical corner of the universe that He created. He declares that you are valuable and glorious and worthwhile and WONDERful. Because the God who created all this, whose ingenuity and infinite power brought all of this ever expanding wonder into existence believed that your existence invisible but for a speck of light hanging in the darkness was of such great worth that He went from all of His vastness to all of your smallness. And that is the wonder of Christmas. It's an all-powerful God who became a powerless infant to tell you something about just how significant you are. It's a wide-eyed wonder at the deep, profound and life-giving love of God."

As my mind's eye finds itself back at No41, I am immeasurably thankful for quiet moments. And DayQuil. And the days to come when I WILL get to know my neighbors better. And a God who is always near.

Wishing you a joy-filled Christmas. And now I'm going back to bed.