Unraveled

Christmas Eve 2014

Spentmostofthedaytakiingoutrowsofknitting. Am now sitting down to write a reflectiononthis frustratintg experience.  But the space baronmycomputer  is malfunctioning.  ;So I’m going to give up.,.,cvx    maybe I fixed it by taking off the key & tinkering with it!!!  Wouldn’t that be a splendid development in an otherwise wasted… unproductive… disappointing day?!!!  The whole day, undoing what it took two evenings of knitting to do….!!!

Giving up would be such an easy thing to do, so often.  I wonder if God ever feels that way…if a God with emotions resembling human ones would have an occasional bad day, or bad decade, or century or millennium.

At the end of my rope (or yarn), I put down the knitting which will be a Christmas gift for one of my daughters, texted my knitting guru, Molly Carlson, announcing my surrender.  You know what she texted back to me on this Christmas Eve evening when she, like every other minister in congregational ministry, has a full evening of very sacred worship ahead of her, and I’m guessing no time to spare?  She said, “Don’t give up.” 

That’ll preach,friends.  It’s the Christmas story of the Holy One who, no matter how messed up things become, WILL NOT give up on us.

So I went up to my kitchen, still in disorder from yesterday’s baking, and thought, “If nothing else, maybe I can create some order from this chaos.” 

Maybe that’s all that the One we celebrate, at this turning of the season toward the coming light, would ask of us… that we not give up... and when it feels like we are powerless, that we throw ourselves into trying to create some order from the chaos.

Lord, God of Hosts,  be with us yet… Amen.