Saturday, I vacuumed up the needles and shards of colored reflective sharpness from the tree, dumping the last insignificant bits of Christmas out of the house in a pine smelling hurricane of dust and ornament debris. Happy end of Christmas break.
I had a 4 o’clock exam on the last day of exams. I walked into Phillips for my 12 o’clock around 11 and walked out afterword to miss the snow and eat pizza and walked back in around 3:30. The world got dark, my weekend plans at home were ruined by a lack of desire to drive up the mountain in the snow and I followed friends around until the Love Feast came Sunday evening and then we drove home. Me and my little brother bought the tree on Tuesday. Between decorating it and taking it down, I spent less hours with this tree than any before it.
Christmas doesn’t really start until I get home. I force my little brother to help me get the boxes down from the attic (that was a party this year with my back), I ask incessantly about the tree and I decorate it and the living room by myself after my older brother puts the lights on the tree. I got home really close to Christmas this year and I left the day after. I missed my tree time. At least one night a year, I turn on the best oldies station I can find and sit and watch the lights of the tree in the window, thinking about the reflection of my life in the music. It’s sappy and wonderful and my soul feels more (or less) human after my time with the tree.
But I just feel tired now, I think. Package me off, shove me in a freezing stadium to watch another great Carolina loss, drive me up to Chapel Hill to play basketball game after basketball game, drive me back and pack me up to head off to Atlanta, bring me back and watch me sleep. I learned a good little bit about driving in Charlotte and about the stadium there. I learned that it is not the best idea in the world to leave me by myself for the vast majority of a couple of days and so shall be seeking company for most of the rest of my life. I learned that I missed my best friend, that I’m insanely jealous of her life in Chile and that it’s not just my father that has a pile of physics questions to ask me. I learned that three nights with 5 hours of sleep pushes a person to the exhaustion point but not to the habitual life of the living dead that a week does. I learned that I listen to sermons and I respond better to worship music when I can worship through a sermon. I learned that January 2nd 2010 was a palindrome. And I learned that even though my heart breaks, I can walk by the pile of packaging that I know is a person frozen more deeply to their bones than I am by the piercing cold snap wind. That tires me.
I loved going on Passion. It was 21,000 Christian peeps descending on Atlanta for a Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morning of worship and concerts and workshops. Wonderful. We had this thing set up downstairs where you could package bibles, pay for translations, fund small business loans for women in South America, help pay for a well, package meals, do so much more. We did great stuff there. But we clapped for it like we had cured cancer or solved global poverty. And I’m not saying that we should expect to do something like that, just a bunch of college kids in town for one weekend, but then again, shouldn’t we? Should we really limit God like that?
And I’m guilty too. I’m jealous of the time I didn’t have for my weakness, pretending that time spent in front of the bright bulbs of a Christmas tree is more important than the host of other things that I could be doing. I was recently told that I needed to be more positive about myself and I’ve thought about that. You know, humility is easy when you don’t think much of yourself, but they normally call it self depreciation at that point. I feel like it’s time for an inspirational turn-around statement. Too bad I don’t have one.
Like, I feel like I should be eternally proving myself to God, but that’s not what I’m doing when I feel like doing good in the world. It’s like I’m driven to it. I hardly ever plan on it and it’s generally given out of my ridiculous overabundance. And I don’t talk to Him because I feel like I have to (and my stomach twists around a little at the remembrance of days when I have), I talk to Him because I need to. Sometimes I need to get out anger and frustration and sometimes I need to work something out in a prayerful state because it’s a little easier to see the lies then. Oil and water. And thank goodness I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t give Him lip service. If I can’t mean the words of a hymn or a song, I won’t sing it. I don’t think the little bundle of resentment and questioning is much better but I won’t pretend around the One who knows it all anyway. I want to be honest. It’s a new feeling.
One of my favorite little things about being home is that my windows in my room face west and in the afternoons light streams in, glorious and gracefull, and the frigid white and navy of my room warms up and admits a heart again. It’s not the cold morning light that demands faithfulness and exacts guilty penance on the tired soul, it’s light that’s grown up, having lived a full day, to send love back out on the world just when it needs the confidence and strength to face the light’s absence. And there may come a day when I understand morning light, but I’d rather be afternoon light. My brain might say that the added redness is just the scattering of the longer wavelengths of light in the additional atmosphere that the light must travel through to reach my eyes later in the day and it may explain the weakness of the sunlight on a winter’s morning due to its changed angle and intensity on the ground and it may object to even presenting the idea that afternoon light is older, as if the photon that finally got released from its long journey from the sun’s fusing core is any different in the evening than in the morning, but my heart tells it to shut up just about now. One of these days, our understanding of nature is going to stop being just science and the afternoon light will help us see the worth of everything, everyone.
Ever see the brown of a normal North Carolina winter as the earth sleeps and the sun bathes a river with its last light of the day? Quietly glorious.
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