Morning has Come

I was going to save this until tomorrow, but have decided to go ahead and publish it anyhow.

I've told you that I feel tremendous relief with this being a new year and all. I told Michael how I did not understand why I would feel miserable in November and December, then suddenly hopeful with the turning of the year, but the Madeleine L'Engle selection I've already shared with you this week sort of answers that question for me. The chapter of The Irrational Season that I quoted from takes it's title from Romans 13:12, "The night is far spent," where L'Engle speaks of advent, the beginning of a new year according to the liturgical church calendar:

In the Christian Church these weeks leading up to Christmas, this dark beginning of our new near, is also traditionally the time of thinking of last things, of the 'eschaton,' the end.

The night is far spent. The day is at hand (2).

People are so often sad at Christmas. They miss their loved ones who are gone. They miss the sunlight, slogging through days that are so often dark and gray. Most of us miss out on fresh air entirely as we spend our few and precious daylight hours locked away inside an office building, behind a desk. The Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons are hard, hard, hard. There's all the pressure of decorating your house if you have a family, buying presents using money you may not have, accumulating debts: debts of money, of sleep, of routine.

What I never knew before is that with the turning of the year the days are getting longer. I start feeling like I can work again. I start remembering how to keep track of all those little details I must keep track of: the contents of the pantry, the history of our lives documented in receipts. Organization at home becomes just a little easier.

It amazes me that for nine months out of the year I have little difficulty tracking all the details associated with spending. No problem paying the bills. No problem filling out the spending log. No problem doing desk work in the middle of the day. There are three months in the year when the task become virtually impossible. Why? Because of darkness. Because of all the extra tasks associated with the season, when I have a hard enough time coping with the regular day-to-day.

We had a Christmas tree, assembled in our living room, decorated by my children, the first purposed Christmas tree I have had in five years of my first-born's life. I couldn't manage anything else, the boxes remained scattered around for the entirety of the season. The kitchen never got quite clean. Presents were wrapped a few short hours before they were opened. But we had Christmas lights inside our house and we had a Christmas tree. This was a huge deal for me.

But look at Romans 13:11-12 with me for a moment:

And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light (NIV).

I'll let you find the context for yourself. The point I'm making here is that somehow, and quite miraculously, the dark night of the holiday season is now over. I think we Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus at this time because his was the light which came to illuminate our darkness. Now the new year has begun, and not just symbolically, but also in actuality, we move into the light. Often I think that all of life, God's ordering of the seasons, is a metaphor for our relationship with Him. I think that people who work the land know this better than we do, those whose every activity is governed by sun and rain and wind.

Moving from the sacred from the profane (though if all of life is a metaphor as I've proposed, then all of life becomes more obviously sacred), I'm still behind from 2011. I still have this mountain of work on top of me, and the mountain is growing. Even when I have the unfortunately rare, disciplined day in which I work with a will toward accomplishing my goals, a confluence of events prevents the progress that I crave. The timing of certain things has not yet begun to work out well for me this year. Last night I went to bed feeling buried.

This morning I still feel buried. I'm praying, "God, I can't do this job, but You can. You can get me through this day, help me organize my time to make tomorrow a little better. Because today there is too much and I won't be able to do it all."

You take one step. And then you recalculate quickly, or slowly, then take another. At least that is the plan. If necessary, you break every task down into fifteen minutes increments, and take a break ever forty-five, if you're following the flylady plan. I don't, typically, but when I've had to, it's worked a treat.

When this is published finally tomorrow, maybe I'll be feeling a little better. Maybe things will be just a little less a mess. It is January now, which means it is just that little bit easier for me to hope.