So Tuesday
mornings, as I’ve mentioned, I sit with my boys, if you can call a bunch of
mostly retired guys boys, and we look at the coming Sunday’s Gospel. It’s 7 AM, and some of us have bed-head only
partially camouflaged by a too-quick comb.
But one of us has always prepared during the week ahead, and this
morning Dave is that guy. Dave’s
good. He’s got a good head, but when he
shares what he’s put together, his heart takes over, and we are treated to his
being moved by the truth he’s put together for us.
He’s prepared, but he’s surprised, too…a
perfect example for Advent and Christmas.
Today, this
second Sunday of Advent, he’s sharing with us an old chestnut, in the season
when we roast them over an open fire, or so the song goes. You know the one. It begins “Prepare ye….”
Making the
crooked path straight and filling in the low places, flattening the bumps. I’m 10 or 11, and in my neighborhood outside
of Chicago the kids I (literally) run around with during the summer are feeling
the thrum on our chests, vibrations from the diesel engines of these enormous
earth-movers with CATERPILLAR in huge black letters in their dust-covered
yellow sides. They’re a block away, up
there inside the fence, building up a flat-topped hill that stretches diagonally
across what had been our ball field, stretches from southeast where Chicago is up
toward Wisconsin somewhere north. Their
wheels are HUGE, taller that we are. The
drivers are like miniature tin toys lost in their cabs, their miniscule arms
with elbows out the windows as they bound at full speed across the hill in
(literally) a cloud of dust.
So the “Prepare
ye” would elicit these me this image of powerful physical change, of
get-out-of-the-way-baby, chest-thrumming, exhaust-belching dust-cloud-making, soil-shoving,
ball field-obliterating power.
But this
morning I think of the chopping of a little knife on a wood cutting board in a
quiet, clean kitchen. I have this friend
Steve who is a brilliant writer working as a cook. He has the heart of a chef, an artist with
anything he touches, so food will work as well as words. But in
today’s job market, he works for his sustenance more as a prep cook than a
chef.
And this
morning my stomach is still smiling from Thanksgiving, when I watched my
son-in-law spend the entire early morning being a prep cook, cutting
vegetables, making sauces, assembling ingredients, covering his kitchen with
the components that would become our once-again wonderful Thanksgiving
dinner. By noon he would be the chef,
assembling all of that, but this morning he was the prep cook.
So now I’m
back with my boys, and Dave is saying (he seems to be discovering it in saying
the words) “It’s popular these days to say that Christmas is about giving, but
for us, Christmas is about preparing to receive the gift that God gives us.”
I’m sitting
next to Dave and smiling. His words, and
my friend Steve, and my son-in-law in his kitchen come to mind, and now the
word “Prepare” is not about power. It's about being the prep cook. I have, as
of today, twenty days to prep myself, to bring out everything I have and make
it available to God, so that God can use all of me. Christmas is
about giving. The perfect Christmas the
one in which we give our whole selves, make out whole selves available. But as Dave says, it’s about receiving
too.
What we
receive is the perfect surprise: what (wonder!) God can make of us. Who’s the chef on TV that finishes every meal
prep with a presentation to the camera and such a Godly phrase…”Oooo, it’s so
GOOD!”
We’ve got 20
days. Chop 'til you drop!
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