The Just-in-Time Miracle of Advent

Reflections on a year that "has not been great."

A couple weeks ago, our eight-year-old said from the backseat of the car: “I regret celebrating the New Year this time. 2020 has not been great.”

I think he speaks for us all.

In February my grandfather died—the one I spent summers with and dedicated this book to. Just a week later, as cases of COVID-19 started to spread in New York City, the organization I work for announced we’d be working from home until further notice. My wife and I initially embraced this as good news. The kids will be in school: we can get some projects done in the apartment. I’ll enjoy a hiatus from the subway. I can adjust my work hours to spend more time with the family.

Our optimism was short-lived. By Monday, schools were closed. Shortly thereafter everything was closed.

Remote learning was a disaster from the beginning. Our oldest complained about headaches induced by hours in front of a screen. Our youngest refused outright to log in for her classes. All other mundane activities were complicated or canceled. We had our groceries delivered and sprayed all bags and boxes with disinfectant before bringing them into the apartment. Playgrounds were empty. Streets were silent.

Then George Floyd was killed in the street. Then the video of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder surfaced. Then news about Breonna Taylor…

Then. Then.  

Then our empty streets filled with demonstrators. And we added to our isolation and the formless blur of daily existence, deep self-reflection and grief. I wrestled with and wrote about my family’s history of racism and slaveholding and my own deep racial bias.

Then there was a round of layoffs at our organization and we said goodbye—virtually!—to dear friends and colleagues.

Then somewhere in there, Americans started clawing at each other’s eyeballs. While we prayed for friends who were in the hospital with COVID-19 and attended virtual funerals for friends who died from COVID-19, other friends and family were claiming that COVID-19 was a hoax and there wasn’t any virus and, anyway, wake up sheeple! The long, slow ramp up to a contentious election made everyone ugly on social media, which is just about the only place we “saw” people at the time. And somewhere in there I started feeling like I was watching my life unfold on a screen and like I wasn’t the one living it anymore. I felt like a spectator in someone else’s story, just watching to see what new catastrophe might befall this poor sap next.  

What I didn’t realize at the time—and really only put my finger on recently—was that we were experiencing the gradual erosion of all our rhythms. As much as I disliked riding the subway at rush hour, the commute gave me dedicated reading time every day. Gone. Friday morning bagel breakfasts with the kids: gone. Saturdays with friends in the park: gone. Sunday morning walks to church and brunch after: gone. Before long all the days felt the same. Our rhythms of rest and relationship and recreation became a smudge of making it through another day at a time.

It wasn’t all bad. (My wife would want me to remember that.) For weeks we raised the windows every night at 7pm and banged on pots and pans and whooped and hollered for several minutes in solidarity with frontline workers in the city. We joined thousands of other Christians in demonstrations against racial injustice, in which we prayed and sang and had church on New York City streets. Once playgrounds re-opened in June, we deepened friendships with neighbors in daily playdates. Beaches opened at half capacity, and I am totally on board with half-capacity beaches.

And then (because we are gluttons for punishment, I guess) we added to the global pandemic and the global cry for justice and the general dissolution of civil discourse—we added to all that a cross-country move from New York City to Phoenix, Arizona. Which brings us roughly to the present in this relatively short account of 2020, a year that has “not been great” as my eight-year-old so deftly understated the situation.

Let’s just say that the move did not go as planned and we spent Thanksgiving in a hotel while we waited for our belongings to be delivered days late, weeks late. And I don’t mind telling you that at this point in 2020 I didn’t feel like a tree planted by streams of water (Psalm 1). I felt like one of those desert trees that clings to the rocks like grim death and waits for the rain. I felt like I was only one more disappointment away from catastrophic system failure of one kind or another.

But our things did finally arrive—and just in time. By Saturday afternoon we had our Christmas tree up and the decorations out. On Sunday we began our Advent rituals. In just a few days our house went from empty to ours. It began to smell like ours, because we cooked some of our family recipes here. It began to sound like ours, because we played some of our music here. Most important, we began our annual Advent traditions, including a story that has us all on the road to Bethlehem.

And now, after months of blurring sameness, our life is beginning to take a shape again. Just a few days into familiar rhythms and rituals, our life is beginning to feel like ours again. Our recent orientation toward Bethlehem brings with it new life.

I can almost feel green leaves returning to brittle branches.

Jesus arrived in Bethlehem for the first time at just the right time—in the “fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4). Israel mourned “in lonely exile here” and had for a good long time, for he arrived after generations of illness and slavery and disappointment.

“Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.” (Jeremiah 31:15)

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1)

I bet it felt to Israel like all of life was blurring and smudging out of shape. Like they were living someone else’s story—one in which God doesn’t keep his promises or remember his people. The last few hundred years had “not been great.”

Even so, there in a dark, quiet corner of an empire, hope was born. Just in time.