So, two places I glimpsed God’s Advent light today. Well, the first was kind of interesting. I have to give a little backstory here. Yesterday I met with my spiritual director. She did something unusual: she gave me homework! The homework was simple: every day, make the time to spend 3-5 minutes just resting in the arms of God. Feel that. Well, as soon as she gave me that assignment, I knew when I would be doing it. For the past six months or so, I’ve set my smartwatch to alert me whenever three things happen: sunrise, solar noon, and sunset. It’s been really interesting as the days have grown shorter and shorter, to be alerted to it at such different times. But I haven’t yet really figured out what to do when these alarms occur. Now I know, and since yesterday, I’ve been using these three times (if I’m in a position where I can do so) to rest in the arms of God for 5 minutes.

So…here’s what happened today. Around 11:45 this morning, I was feeling rather tired and unmotivated. I decided that I was going to lie down on the couch and start a new book. If I was able to keep reading, great. If I ended up taking a nap, great. The book is The Possession of Mr. Cave by Matt Haig, and I read just the first two sentences: “Of course, you know where it begins. It begins the way life begins, with the sound of screaming.” Wow. What a powerful opener. I put the book down and closed my eyes. Life begins with the sound of screaming. I thought about my own life. I thought about my own birth, and pondered how I naturally have no memory of it, no idea who the doctors or nurses were, no idea what the room looked like, and so forth. But, like Haig wrote, I’m confident that the first thing I did was scream. And then my thoughts turned dark. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I settled in for what I figured would be a nice, melancholy, unhealthy stream of consciousness, a garden path of misery and self-loathing. And then my watch buzzed. Nope! No garden path here! It was time for my noontime rest in God. And that’s what I did instead. The timing was sublime. The five minutes of rest turned into an hour-long nap, and when I woke up I got right in my car to go do some “forest bathing.”

The second one is very different, and I’m going to be a little coy about it. I received an email inviting me to consider an opportunity to get my book Darkwater some extra publicity, and I decided to go for it. Watch this space for the next few weeks, and you’ll most likely hear about it. I so much believe that the message of that book is a message God has given me to share, and so I’m seeing this as a sign of light, shining on the path I can go down to get that message out.

That’s where I saw the light of God today, the second Friday of Advent.

Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay