12 Days, T-36 Hours

It is early Christmas morning. Christmas Eve candlelight is still ringing in my ears. Singing “Silent Night” in candlelight with an accappella verse thrown in is a moving event! All the Christmas preparations are complete, or they don’t matter anymore. Christmas is here! The tiny Savior is born! And with Him a great hope!

The preparations for the 12 Days of Christmas prayer are also complete, or they don’t matter anymore. The schedule has been laid out, the location set, and a list of leaders prepared. My name is on that list too many times, but that is the way it is.

I’m a bit nervous about how this project will play out, but not overly so. It was never intended to be my project anyway; but His. If this were all mine, I would have bailed long ago! There has been way too much uncertainty in this for my taste. My previous post talks about the walk. But each step has been in the Lord’s hands and everything has fallen in place.

There is nothing left to do but show up and see what He has in store for us.

And that has been the point of this project, the anticipation of Jesus’ arrival and our preparation to receive Him. We’re supposed to make that preparation before Christmas during the Advent season. But, as usual, we humans have heaped a lot of other meanings and expectations on top of that and created a time of great stress for ourselves.

The intent is to take the time “after” to do what we should have done “before”. But it’s not really “after”? There is an actual tradition of the 12 days of Christmas beyond the partridge song. In my tradition, the period of time between Jesus’ birth and when the Wise Men arrived. Can you imagine how the Christmas story really played out? In today’s world there is very little that captures our attention for 12 days…

Emmanuel, God with us. Joy to the World!