How to Go Gently Into the End of the Year
Go gently into the end of the year, into relaxed smiles and unassuming joy, into the sheer delight of flexibility and strung lights, into unapologetic wonder and eruptions of laughter.
Embrace Advent with a stilled and grateful heart, slowed breath, and lightened expectations. Make room to kneel right there in wonder beneath the same sky that illuminated the newborn Light of the World.
Go gently and prayerfully towards the wide open slate of new resolutions, word-of-the-year options, and end-of-the-year reflections.
Here’s permission, slipped right into your hand, to watch your breath hover in the air, to scoop up snow in mittened hands and let it fly, to dip your toes in chilled ocean or river or lake, or meader through a Christmas tree forest. Wherever you live, you’re welcome to live with eyes wide with merriment and curiosity.
Because maybe all of it has started to feel heavy–all this keeping up and not letting anyone down. All this outdoing last year.
The Best Exchange
You don’t have to hold all the worn and busted together, don’t have to be the one who always holds and never breaks, don’t have to have all the answers, all the solutions, all the patience and grit and strength.
Instead, you get to be cupped in hands of grace, held to the chest of the Author of Strength, Giver of Answers, Calmer of Storms, Awakener of Hearts.
How’s this for a trade? Your never-named aloud fears, your residual shame, your tucked-deep message of unworth, the lists you haven’t completed, the names you’ve called yourself inside your head, the band-aids over old scars–for the deepest inhale of grace that makes you feel light and lovely from your nose to your toes.
It’s the kind of exchange Jesus had in mind when He beckoned all the weary ones to come in close, taste His goodness, rest in His enfolding grace. All your heavy for the fullness of freedom. All your lack for His outrageous love.
Reading the beloved words in Ephesians 1:4-7 from The Voice Translation,
God chose us to be in relationship with Him even before He laid out the plans for this world; He wanted us to live holy lives characterized by love, free from sin, and blameless before Him. He destined us to be adopted as His children, through the covenant Jesus the Anointed inaugurated in His sacrificial life. This was His pleasure and will for us. Ultimately God is the one worthy of praise for showing us His grace; He is merciful and marvelous, freely giving us these gifts in His Beloved. Visualize this: His blood, freely flowing down the cross, setting us free!
It’s benevolent grace arching over our daily lives, meeting us in the tensions of expectation and capacity, want and need, doubt and trust, control and surrender.
Ease Unhurried to the End of the Year
I ponder adoption as Livy, the stray kitty we adopted the other week, bounds up the basement stairs at 5:30 in the morning, already purring. She’s 10 lbs. of soft fur, content rumble, and unabashed need for affection climbing into my lap.
Maybe that’s how we ease unhurried into the end of the year–we awaken to how we’re welcome. How our old life is behind us and the new is here like an open lap. We know only this: the joy of being in God’s presence.
If I didn’t question the cherishing love of Jesus, the way I melt His heart, I think I’d never get enough. I’d seek Him relentlessly, follow Him everywhere He goes as Livy often does with me throughout the day.
I’ll bet if I lived every day like I was chosen and adopted, David’s words in Psalm 141:1 would slip often into my prayers: “My gaze is fixed on You, Eternal One, my Lord” (The Voice).
I’d pay attention to the slightest sound telling me God is near. Run joyfully into His stretched-wide, nail-scarred arms. Rest there with no restraint.
What I Get Backwards
But I tend to forget. Tend to try harder and walk faster instead of savoring the end of the year. I pick back up what’s not mine to carry, set goals I struggle to reach–for what? To hurry on faster to where exactly?
I’m guessing I’m not the only one who gets this backwards. Who forgets to breathe in a month where wonder seeps through silent nights and straw in stables and stars in the sky.
Almost nothing will build more slow into your day faster than a cat who wants to sleep in your lap and be pet even when she’s eating. In a season with ample invitation to buy and do more, I’m grateful for my slow-down companion.
Her pur gives me pause, helps me see what I miss when I rush–Jesus and people right in front of me. The actual point of Christmas–the good news that we’re adopted and adored. The mission that comes with the family name–to praise Him in the presence of others.
Go Gently Forward, Friend
Could I be a slow-down friend for you today? I’m picturing you here, sitting where the sun hits the velvet couch. Your head is bowed ever so slightly and your hands rest on your knees, palms up.
As you take a few deep breaths, here’s what I’d pray over you:
Jesus, You see my friend. She loves her people fiercely, but she’s tired– tired from trying to be everything and still feeling like it’s not enough. Worn down from trying to keep up and make everything pretty and ensure it’s all perfect. Hug her tight right now. Remind her how beautiful and welcome and adored she is.
Would You fill her with curiosity and joy? Let her slow often to scoop wildly fresh winter air into her lungs. May her laughter be effortless and her eyes radiant as she knows with all the sureness in her soul that she is Yours.
Just a friend over here in your corner,
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