My Egg-carton Advent

My Egg-Carton Advent

Last spring I spent many weeks working on my master’s thesis: an apologetic of the role words play in coming to faith and growing in it. It was a nontraditional sort of fulfillment of a traditional requirement. And it was much more difficult than I ever imagined it might be.

For example, to demonstrate how affected I was as a child by the poetry of Emily Dickinson, I had to remember myself as that child—to rediscover the condition of my heart and the particulars of my life when I first encountered her work. But once I managed to put myself emotionally in the past, I couldn’t remain there. I wasn’t writing in a child’s voice or a young adult’s voice—I was writing as the woman I am today.

As challenging as my thesis was, the single emotion that dominated this process for me was gratitude. I saw, all over again, the providence of God in my life as he brought each of my literary guides and their words to me just in time. I needed Emily as a child. Her poetry was food for a heart that was starving for something other and for the assurance of a deeper, wider world. I needed C. S. Lewis as a college student, coming into my faith apart from my family of origin, learning how to love, and beginning to make my way in the world. Most recently, I have needed Ignatius of Loyola to understand and experience anew the nearness of God, to encounter him in a place beyond words.

So this Advent season, instead of the typical calendar that emphasizes waiting for the Messiah, a wise friend suggested I create a different sort of calendar that adds a reminder each day of how Christ has come, and is coming, to me. You might think the egg carton on my kitchen counter looks a little plain and strange, but each odd artifact or rolled scrap of paper tells a story of its own—of how the Word keeps coming to me. When I take the time to breathe in his presence, the richness of his love never stops amazing me. Even so, Lord Jesus . . . come.

Do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?

Romans 2:4, NASB