Day 330 Christmas Series: Riding a Donkey Down Elverson

Chris at Antonio's

December 2, 2015

Day 330

So, are you ready for Christmas? 

This question has made my mind swirl. Am I ready for Christmas? I don't know. Are you? I am never quite sure what you mean? Are you asking if I have my decorations up? Or are you asking if I have my gifts ready? It is safe to assume that I should probably answer no. But it's Christmas and I need to keep things on the up and up. So, I answer yes and spare you the millions of thoughts you have just birthed. I am ready but probably not in the way you are asking but in the way I have chosen to prepare.


 This question, "am I ready," always gets stuck up there in my noggin. You wouldn't know it. I have become good at simply answering yes. I am literal and I am a thinker. And this combination sucks, big time, especially at a time like this. So my mind races to wonder what you mean versus what I mean and how I should answer. But for Pete's sake, all you are doing is asking a simple Christmas conversation starter. That's all. You are not looking for a philosophical answer. And at this time of year, you don't really have time to hear my response.

Why these picture. Because.

Am I lying when I say yes, if I have not even purchased one item or there are no decorations up? No. Am I answering your question? No. Then, what am I doing? I am just going for the simple while pushing past the complicated. I am opening the shutters to say like a cuckoo clock, no. Us literalists, we've learned a thing or two.

We laugh. A lot!

How am I prepared? Every Christmas I prepare by contemplating. I contemplate the birth, the virgin, the husband, the man/God, the manger, the smells, the donkey, the star, the wise men, the other people, the shepherd. There is always a new twist, something I had never thought of.  I think of the place of vulnerability God allowed Himself to be in. I don't get it. I don't get so much of it. It hardly penetrates into that place that freaks out, that utters a long and enduring WWWWWWWWHHHHHHHAAAAAATTTTT?????????? It is so familiar. So every year I chisel away at the familiarity and beg for the remarkableness of it all.

One christmas I proposed something. Let's find a stable in a field. Let's go and just be and listen to the silence. "Go ahead mom, we'll be having hot chocolate at home." Thank God for my children! I'd be a freaking lunatic riding a donkey through town trying to get the feel, the sense, the aura.  Jesus says the same thing to me, "Lynne, just come back to your living room. Hang out with us there!"  Children......