Post Script | December 19, 2022

What's fitting right now

I was hurrying our boys out the door last week on the first of their exam days. “Put your cereal bowl in the dishwasher!” “Wipe the table!” “Don’t forget your teacher gifts!” By the time everyone was in the car, Andrew—normally easygoing and pleasant—was answering me in clipped tones. He didn’t like being barked at.

I’d had a similar interaction with Ryan earlier that same morning. He didn’t know, of course, that I had been up an hour before my alarm, worrying that I hadn’t booked my mother a hair appointment before Christmas. He found me at my computer after my morning workout, sweaty and stressed. I was ordering vanities for the bathrooms we’re renovating this spring.

“I love you,” he said sweetly, kissing my check and rubbing my back.

“Mm-hmm,” I mumbled, shrugging him off.

“What? What did I do?”

“I appreciate your sweet words, but if you really want to love me this month, I’m going to need you to help with everything that needs to be done.”

That’s when my Enneagram 5 husband, alert to the smoke escaping my ears, slowly nodded and took a step back. “Can I make you eggs for breakfast?” I said yes, and he slunk away to the kitchen.

Gratefully, I’ve managed to avoid the major holiday meltdown that used to be a predictable pattern for me this time of year. This isn’t to stay I’m not feeling the time-pressure, that I’m not fighting irritability. It is to say that I’m trying my best to stick to my grounding routines: morning prayer, exercise, gratitude, Scripture memory.

Time is scarce in December, and I think this season is especially hard for women. I’m not looking at hard data here, so please forgive what might be a gross generalization. I’m just noting that most of the women I know are the ones to buy and wrap the family gifts as well as to plan the holiday meals and prepare for guests.

These are a lot of extra demands on our time, especially for those of us with work responsibilities beyond the home. When the calendar is already full, it’s not easy to find margins of time for all the holiday responsibilities.

In the busyness of these days, one question is especially helpful for me. It centers around the concept of “fitting time,” which I introduce in the “Remember” chapter of In Good Time. Fitting time is attentive to the season, to what is opportune at any particular moment.

It was fitting, for example, for our family to move to Ohio this summer to care for my mother. These demands are now, and it wasn’t as if we could postpone our responsibilities. They came with a timestamp, with the realization that if we didn’t attend them now, we might never attend them.

In the same way, the church calendar points us to what is fitting in a particular season. Advent is a time of preparation, of anticipation, of welcome. In the Advent season, it is fitting to make room in our lives for our families, our friends, our neighbors. It is fitting to attend the lonely, the immigrant, the widow, the orphan. It is fitting that we find ourselves in church, worshipping in the congregation of God’s people and telling the true story of time: that God was willing to enter it, even to suffer it.

It does not seem fitting, in this season, for my house to stay clean. It does not seem fitting to cling to inflexible schedules and demand perfection of all my efforts. It is certainly not fitting to find myself without capacity for attending the miracle of God made flesh, even if all I can manage is a playlist that lifts my heart to consider the mystery.

To live fitting time, we attend the important yeses of now, postpone the good yeses that can wait until the calendar turns and we return to work.

January will come. December is now. Merry Christmas to each of you, as you live this week fittingly.

P.S. If you live anywhere close to Grand Rapids, I’m doing an author event at the Baker Book House on Friday, January 13th, at 7p.m. It’s FREE, and I’d love to see you there!