Post Script | December 12, 2022

Advent Time — and the Preparation We're All Making

Last Thursday, I arrived early to the Christmas choral concert at my mother’s retirement community. She was one of a handful of altos. I took my seat in the small chapel hung with woven purple tapestries, and the room soon filled with men and women pushing walkers and riding in wheelchairs.

“Martha, you can sit here,” one of the staff members said, directing a gray-haired woman to the seat beside me. I recognized Martha as one of the residents from the memory care unit, a pleasant-faced women who said very little.

On the chapel stage, the small section of baritones—bulked up by a visitor with a printed nametag—sat to the left of the black grand piano. A near-dozen women sat to its right. When the concert finally began, the director introduced herself as the daughter of the woman in the first row, a woman whose hands I had already noticed as they had been gnarled with age.

What will it be like to grow old? I find myself asking more and more these days.

I didn’t expect this concert, in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, to be an occasion of Advent worship. But by the third song, my soul had caught up with my body, and I found my eyes filling with tears as the choir sang, Who would send a baby? by Mary Kay Beall.

Who would send a baby to heal a world in pain?

Who would send a baby, a tiny child?

When the world is waiting for the Promised One,

who would send His only Son?

Who would send a baby to light a world with love?

Who would send a baby, a tiny child?

When the world is hoping for the Promised One,

who would send His only Son?

Who would choose a manger to cradle a king?

Who would send angels to sing?

Who would hang a star in the sky above

to shine on the gift of His infinite love?

Who would send a baby to bless a world with peace?

Who would send a baby, a tiny child?

When the world is yearning for the Promised One,

who would send a baby?

Who would send a baby?

Who would send His only begotten Son?

Hearing that song—and sitting in a crowd of people bent and stooped with age—I thought about the conversation I'd just had with Hannah Anderson, as we talked live on Instagram about her recently released book, Heaven and Nature Sing.

Hannah and I had talked about Advent as a season of preparation, as an invitation to step outside of the urgent timelines the world sets for us. We talked about the season as taking its cues from a wintering landscape and suggesting the good that happens in dormancy. We talked about how Advent ushers us into the holiness of synchronized time, this time that we can keep together in communities.

At Thursday’s concert, I couldn’t help but think about the preparation we are all doing in life, which is to say the preparation for death. It’s a morbid thought, perhaps, and certainly a sobering one. But what the Bible says is both unremarkably and startlingly true: that we are a mist, a vapor, a passing shadow, a blade of withering grass. “Remember that you die,” the monks have taught us to rehearse, in chorus with the biblical writers.

It’s Advent—and we’re rightly thinking of the coming of Christ. Of pregnancy and birth. Of beginnings. But I appreciate those who have said that Advent is liminal time, the time in-between. In fact, as Fleming Rutledge wrote in her book on Advent, all mortal time is Advent Time.

Remember that you die. Truthfully, 2022 has not been a year to let us forget: beginning with the death of my mother’s husband and now her own health challenges. These are hardships—and they are also mercies.

I left Thursday’s concert with my mother, and Mabel, caught up to us with her walker. “Will you come and see my apartment?” she asked. “My daughters have decorated it for Christmas.” Yes, of course we would. Mabel beamed to show us the Christmas decorations collected from her travels. She told me the gold ones, hung on the lampshade, had come from McAlpin’s.

“I’m not familiar with McAlpin’s,” I admitted. Mabel explained that it had been an historic downtown department store that every year for more than a decade, had issued a new ornament featuring a different Cincinnati city scape.  

After admiring her many Christmas decorations as well as the pictures of her four children, I stepped closer to the door. I needed to pick up my boys from school.

“Before you go,” Mabel said, “could you help me fold my sheets?” The housekeeper had changed the bed, and she had laundered the dirty sheets. They were balled up in a shopping bag hung from her walker.

Mabel’s hands shook as she took them from the bag, paired one corner and let me pair the other. I told her I loved to fold sheets, that I had a trick for the fitted sheet, which I could fold almost as neatly as the flat sheet. I finished with the pillowcase, then smoothed the stack and asked where she’d like them stored. She pointed to the bottom drawer of her dresser.

She brimmed with an obvious gratitude—and I had only folded her sheets! But aren’t those just the tasks that become difficult when your hands gnarl and tremble, when they don’t work as they once did?

I thought of Advent: of the season of preparation. I thought of life: and the time that will end before beginning again. I thought of the preparation we are all making.

I thought too of Dante—and the poetry of Purgatorio, the middle third of the Divine Comedy dedicated to the theme of preparation. Saints climb Mount Purgatory, and as they ascend through the various terraces, the stain of the seven deadly sins is erased from their foreheads. They grow lighter, climb swifter. They are urged toward hurry because delay is always grief. Paradise awaits!

If time is a currency in Dante’s Purgatorio, it is not a commodity. “Think that it dawns but once, this day of grace.”

This is the closest sentiment to what I’ve learned over the course of writing In Good Time. Time is a gift, given by God. And if there are urgencies in this life, they are not work deadlines and Christmas shopping and home dec projects. Seek first the kingdom, and everything else you need (presumably time itself) will be added unto you.

That certainly felt true in the writing of this book. In August 2021, I told my MFA mentor that I was better off returning the advance for In Good Time. Of the 60,000 words due on December 1st, I had written only 15,000. Thankfully, she encouraged me to persevere—and with her help, I did.

I wrote last fall and early winter in conditions that did NOT make for writing. I was assuming new responsibilities for my mother. We were researching schools and churches and communities, considering a move to Cincinnati. I traveled more than normal, including a ten-day trip to be with my friend in Scotland, who had a cancer diagnosis.

The book was written in spite of time, not because of it. As I write at the end of the acknowledgements, “On paper, there was not enough time to write this book. Then again, paper tells a partial truth.”

In Good Time releases tomorrow, and I want to say that I am grateful to you as a community of Post Script readers for your interest and constant support of my writers. Publishing today is a funny industry—and by funny, I guess I mean tenuous. It’s a gift to do this work, and I am grateful for it.

If you’d like to support the work I’m doing—and the time that it takes—here are a couple of ideas.

1.     Buy the book wherever books are sold! Don’t forget to download your free copy of my Good Time Habits PDF.

2.     Register for the Rule of Life workshop I’m offering in January.

3.     Read and review the book. You can review it wherever you purchased it, and you can also review it on Goodreads, if you’re a member of that community.

4.     Share the book:

a.     With your friends and family.

b.     With your church.

c.     On your social media.

5.     Most importantly, pray. Pray this book reaches the readers it’s meant to, those who need gospel hope and help for their time-anxiety.

As always, thanks for reading here!

P.S. Collin Hansen, of The Gospel Coalition, and I had a great conversation on “Time Well Spent.” You can listen here.