By the third week in Advent, the pressure of events is beginning to wear you down. It is important to continue to at least take some mini space to nurture yourself. The focus of both the psalm, Psalm 126, and the Epistle, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24, is on joy and thanksgiving. While we often remind our congregation that this is the season of joy, it is important for us to occasionally pause and experience joy ourselves.
Again, I would suggest that you set a reminder alarm for each day to remind you to pull away even if for five minutes to focus on your own faith journey and your relationship with the risen Christ. Let me suggest a way to structure that brief time period. One, which always fills me with awe, is to briefly review some of the “might not have happened” events in your history that shaped the direction of your life. If you like this, you may want to do it for several days of your week.
Divide your life into periods, perhaps every ten years, or distinct moves between churches or other significant markings in your life. Take the first period and simply let the events leading up to and during that period to play across your mind. Look for those incidents that might not have happened but because they did altered your life in a positive way. It might be how you met your spouse, or how you chose your seminary, or a comment that someone made that burned into your brain. Whatever it was, because it happened and affected you the way it did, you are a different person than you otherwise would have been. If you choose, even the negative experiences can be transformed into a positive response.
In joy and thanksgiving, rejoice in those memories. Then the next day, choose another period and repeat. Some of the events may have been sad, some hilarious, and others might appear ordinary until you recognize how they shaped you. To paraphrase Psalm 126:2, in thinking about those events, you may find your mouth filled with laughter and your tongue filled with shouts of joy. You are loved and have not been left alone.
