Something to look forward to.

Maybe you haven’t noticed (I have), but I haven’t been on a trip in something outrageous like seven weeks. And get this: I don’t have any airline tickets booked.
Shocking, I know. It’s strange, no doubt, but I am finding that one does get used to it.
To delay any anxiety about this truth I took a little time yesterday looking at pictures from my time in the Pacific Northwest this summer.

And here is one I completely forgot about. The story goes that my favorite 15 year old boy stole my camera…and then days later I found this on the memory card:

I think he was trying to make it look like he is squashing my head.

Ha. What a doll.

 Since I have been home for what seems like decades now, there has been a resurgence of a belief I started holding a while back: there is very little worth staying out for past 11 pm.

It started as a funny joke between me and a friend as we were saying sometimes we feel like 80 year old women trapped in the bodies of 20-something girls, because we like to garden and crochet or embroider and, get this—hate being out past 11 pm, but it really has evolved into this deep-seeded truth.

While I am finding myself QUITE content to be home and to, yes –believe it, not stay out past 11 pm, I will admit that there is something very strange, even maybe a little unnerving, about not having any trip-plans all set in stone for the future. Not having any tickets purchased. Not having some get-away I am working towards.

Oh sure, there will be Christmas which I have to drive to. And then a family thing this winter which I have to drive to. All wonderful things, but nothing I will have to strategically plan for, go through security for, pull out clothing for a different climate.

It always happens this way then, when no plans are crowding my mind, that I find myself praying, “Well, Lord. Now what? What should I think about now?”

How strange, really. Praying for something to think about.

And praying I was the other day. I suppose because it’s December my mind wandered to Christmas during this prayer time. I am always so moved at the verse in 1 John—which I associate with Christmas—that simply says, “The life appeared,” (Chapter 1, verse 2). And he appeared in a way they weren’t expecting. Not as a conquering militant king, not as a political super power, not as a play-by-the-rules religious leader, but as a baby. Helpless, hunted, and miraculously human.

Do you think he ever wondered “What now?” I mean, clearly this question is hypothetical, for he knew the future. But he had those first 30 years. Do you think he ever got bored of it? Was he ever “chomping at the bit”?

Who knows. It does make me wonder, though, as I sit in these seasons of life.

Or do you ever wonder why he chose to be born THAT YEAR??? Why was that the time his patience had come due? Why was Mary the one he chose, of all the girls in Israel, why her? Why was Joseph the one chosen to be his earthly step dad? Why were those specific shepherds chosen to send the angelic choir to?

The mind of God is unfathomable, and I am ok with that. I know his character enough to know that he will tell me what I need to know, if I need to know it. Which is a fact I can rest in.

For whatever reason, the Life appeared at that time, to those people. They were the ones who saw it. He chose that their times were going to be his times, too.  He had told them for centuries to look for him. He promised he was coming. He told them to be ready.

In praying about these “Now what?” moments and thinking about the people before Christ came, I thought, “At least they had something to look forward to. They knew you were coming, Jesus.”

I smiled. At that point I remembered one key thing, one thing I admit I have not been thinking about enough:

The next coming.

Do you ever feel like you forget that he is coming again?!!? I mean, how do I do that?! Is there really anything else to think about at all!?!? I have gone off all over the world and have had adventures and seen amazing, beautiful, and miraculous things and somehow thought that it was all really—Something.

But compared to what’s coming for me, what—if you know Christ—is coming for you, all of those “somethings” are really nothing!

My greatest adventures are yet to take place. I could take this world by storm, I could traverse all lands by hot air balloon and all waters by sail boat but nothing, and I mean nothing, will compare to the great something that is COMING! God, in his infinite wisdom, hasn’t regaled to us all details of how it will all happen, when it will all happed, but he has told us enough to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it WILL happen. That it’s something we need to be looking forward to!

As I was flipping through some of those pictures I found another one that the boy must have taken at the same time as all the others I didn’t know he was taking:

 

It looks like he is coming to take me away.
And isn’t that a part of the next Great Adventure, too?

So the next time you find yourself in some situation where someone asks you “Now what do you have to look forward to?” we can say with confidence, “I’m waiting for the Life to appear—again. And this time he is taking me with him.”