An Angel or messenger of God usually begins with some form of these words: Do not be afraid. Must be a common response to facing whatever life presents.

Parents from well-worn Bible stories are among those who heard these words. Jesus’ mother Mary, Samuel’s mother Hannah, John the Baptizer’s mother and father and even Jesus’ earthly father Joseph were confronted with impossible circumstances that were beyond easy explanation when the angels’ message came. Some of the stories actually say the recipients were afraid. I, too, know fear from unknown and known circumstances (and from some I merely imagine could be true).

For me, being a parent to adult children is one particular kind of challenge. I have spent the majority of the past two months and now in the month ahead with my adult children in life-altering circumstances. While the circumstances are very different for each of them, I see how that being afraid causes me to get stuck, to react, or to act seeking my own way. It doesn’t seem like fear, though, on the surface. My fears are masked as helping, rescuing, and managing circumstances that are not my own.

What can I learn from these stories? Is the response simply to not be afraid? Or, is there something more to the ubiquitous request?

I took notice when the strong women in the book I just finished reading, Dream Wheels by Richard Wagamese, define a mother’s courage in a contemporary setting. Johanna’s son’s life has been radically changed by calculated physical risk-taking to chase a dream. Claire’s son’s life has been radically changed by a lifetime of oppression and searching for hope in all the wrong places. The women learn from one another and a greater power for good in their lives to provide space for their own and their sons’ way toward wholeness and healthy parent/adult child relationships.

Johanna grinned. “The natural thing would be to worry, fret over him, try to make things easy for him, coddle him. But that wouldn’t solve anything. In the end it would only hurt him more. So I have to choose to let him walk the path he wants to walk. Choose to be confident that I raised him with the principles that will save him. Choose to believe in him. And ultimately choose to not worry—the ultimate unnatural act for a mother.”

“Faith,” Claire said.

“Courage,” Johanna said. “Faith is what we earn when we have enough courage to face what is in front of us.”

 Maybe that is what the ancient people did when their angels came with the news— they had enough courage to face what was in front of them even when it was scary.

 My friend Randall lived that notion of courage to faith in front of me. Randall’s not so old, older brother died last week. I didn’t know his brother. I did witness the way that my friend faced the great struggle that was his brother’s life. Somehow he stood beside him and yet allowed his brother to walk his own path. Even when it didn’t seem on the surface that things worked out, Randall noticed the ways his brother gave and received grace. He was able to eulogize the principles that his brother lived that gave me a glimpse of another way of facing fear in relationship with courage.

Walter Brueggemann reflects that Advent is a time of struggle between the poem that opens the future—that God will work – and the memo that keeps us thinking we are in control. We know about endings and the old scripts that bind us. Brueggeman says that we know the weariness that comes from propping up old realities.

Courage involves a choice as Johanna says. So I have to choose to let him walk the path he wants to walk. I choose to be confident that I raised him with the principles that will save him. I choose to believe in him. And ultimately choose to not worry and not to get caught in the old realities.

In this season, free us for a new beginning – to have the courage to face what is in front of us even when it is scary. Faith comes from the courage to face new realities with trust. Whether in death or life, have the courage to believe in the person—no scripts attached.

If  I didn’t have a dog that would surely develop an untenable morning habit, I might try it—just getting up at 3:00 a.m. for the day.  I could quit trying to wrestle my body and my mind back to sleep, being careful not to stir too much. Let one sleeping dog lie. I heard an interview with Dolly Parton, who said she does get up at 3 am and gets more work done from three until seven in the morning than most people do all day.

I used to wake up fairly regularly at 3:00 a.m.

I would read a good novel for 15 or 20 minutes and eventually fall back asleep until a respectable time to wake. Over the last couple of months though, the times I wake up in the deep of the night are multiple: 12:30, 1:45, and 2:30. And, reading for a while doesn’t seem to work; my mind is too full and it is an endless chore to sort through the worries.

I came upon this poem written by Julie Elliot, a Spiritual Director at Pacific Jubilee Associates. I don’t know Julie, but she knows me. I was struck by the truths for my experience that this poetry can evoke.

When You Can’t Sleep at Night – by Julie Elliot

You wake in the night,

parched,

anxious,

thirsty for something you cannot name.

You’ve been worrying again.

Mistaking worry for love,

again.

Trying to control others’ lives.

Forgetting your own.

It dries you out like the pine needles

that scatter themselves outside your bedroom window.

Brown and lifeless they fall to the ground,

in every season, every weather.

An inevitable carpet growing under the old Ponderosa.

 

You wake to the choice.

Will the falling needles be an endless chore?

You’ll rake them constantly even as they drift down

to settle in your hair and on your shoulders.

Or will you let them fall the way they do,

noticing the beauty of their changing patterns,

a lacy mat under your feet

becoming part of the holy ground

on which you stand?

 

You wake up to your life

as it is.

Call it Presence.

Call it God.

Call it Love.

Immovable reality.

It’s yours. It’s in front of you.

Suffering grows when you worry

against it.

One truth is the power of poetic language to give images and words that illuminate my experience. After a particular wakeful night, Mitch would ask me, “What were you so anxious about?”

Sometimes, I honestly didn’t know. But, there was that feeling that Julie figuratively describes as “parched, anxious, and thirsty for something you cannot name.”

Last night I was caught worrying again, like Julie’s truth to tell, mistaking the thoughts for love or prayer and they are neither. My concern is one of an urgent need to change, rescue, or convince a life that is not my own.

The second truth is even more demanding—waking to a choice.

Lately, I have been able to name my worry. Maybe that is because I have been more intentionally naming my fears in a challenging situation, out loud, in the regular daylight.  However, in the morning light, what I worried about in the dark doesn’t always make good sense. I gain a new perspective when I confront the error of my nighttime assumptions that seemed so real hidden in the covers of my bed.

What would it be like to let my worries fall the way they do and just let them be?

What would it take to notice the beauty of the changing patterns they make and to recognize those patterns as part of the holy ground on which I stand?

Suffering only grows when you worry against it.

So what can I be grateful for in the past 24 hours?

Mitch, who steadily calls me back from worry, from ignoring my own life, and from dictating what is possible.

In his sermon, recalling the Advent story of Zachariah and Elizabeth, Mitch said that it didn’t take Zachariah long to play the card of impossibility, to offer God a reality check when confronted with the news that he would soon have a son (Luke 1).  Zachariah was afraid and silenced. Some of us think we know all too well what is possible, or not, and even what can or needs to happen.

I do that. Many times, I act like it is my job to sort out what might and can happen in the situation before me, thus deciding what is possible or not in my own life. Mitch’s Advent question is still with me:

How do we prepare ourselves to again birth the impossible into our lives and into our world?

One lesson from Zachariah’s story might be to dedicate more time for silent waiting. Maybe not being able to speak out loud was a gift for Zachariah. For me, that silence also includes quelling the voices in my head where I offer my own version of what is possible in my real world.

Walter Bruggeman proposes another tactic in his advent study. He calls my attention to the poetry of Isaiah 65:17-19 and the possibility of newness found in these verses. In response to this audacious possibility, he says,

The new world of God is beyond our capacity and even beyond our imagination. It does not seem possible. In our fatigue, our self-sufficiency, and our cynicism, we deeply believe that such promises could not happen here. Such newness is only poetic fantasy.

For me, I know that things don’t always turn out all right and at the same time, there are turns of events that I notice only after I’ve lost my way.

Cynthia Bourgeault says that synchronicity—a kind of miracle I most often experience—is the by-product of surrender, not the main event.

To more deeply hear and surrender to God what is possible, I might do what Walter Bruggeman suggests, to read and re-read this poem in Isaiah to let it seep into my bones and heart and vision.   As I read and re-read, I began to re-write the poem to hear God’s words in my own heart.

For I am about to create

new reality for you.

The former things you fear will

not be in the forefront or

readily come to mind.

Be glad and rejoice forever

in what I am creating;

for I am about to create this new way of seeing as a joy,

and its people as a delight.

I will rejoice in the newness

and delight in my family.

No more will fear be my dwelling place.

Me, adapted from Isaiah 65: 17 -19

The poem in Isaiah is outrageous, Bruggeman says, and mine is too. I am not the one who decides or orchestrates what is possible, in my life or anyone else’s. Bruggeman reminds me where this power rests.

In Advent, however, we receive the power of God that is beyond us. This power is the antidote to our fatigue and cynicism. It is the gospel resolution to our spent self-sufficiency, when we are at the edge of our coping. It is good news that will overmatch our cynicism that imagines there is no new thing that can enter our world.

 My cynicism is rooted in fear, where I decide what is possible. For this day, may I live in the outrageous possibility of the power of God to prepare me to again birth the impossible into my life and into our world.

Advent is preparation for the demands of newness that will break the tired patterns of fear in our lives.                         Walter Bruggeman

I’ve been riding a rollercoaster of fear for a while– maybe a lifetime.  About 2:30 AM this morning, mostly in the dark, I was writing in my journal. There I was again, unable to stop my mind from going to all the places I cannot change. Based on a few assumptions and fueled by nighttime anxieties, I re-enacted just one of the tired patterns of fear in my life. The dark makes it easy to imagine scenes laced with a few well-placed “facts” that prove why I must rescue, protect and manage a life—not my own.

I’m having trouble letting go of that dark, the fear of what might be, that Buechner says I wrap myself in like a straightjacket. Even after wise counsel from my partner, a sermon this morning (by the same partner) that said we don’t orchestrate what is possible, and pleading prayer, the dark still lurks. But, there is a glimmer of light. My husband said I need to live my own life.

Listening anew to the Advent stories in Luke’s chapter 3, Luke says that Jesus will come to baptize me with the Holy Spirit and fire. I’ve lived a long life seeking God’s presence. I’m not sure that this has ever happened to me and I am sure I really don’t know what that means.

My friend Walter Bruggeman told me in my reading this morning. He says that means

…we may be visited by a spirit of openness, generosity, energy, that “the force” may come over us, carry us to do obedient things we have not yet done, kingdom things we did not think we had in us, neighbor things from which we cringe. The whole tenor of Advent is that God may act in us, through us, beyond us, more than we imagined…

 And then there is that part about Advent being preparation that will break the tired patterns of fear that I so desperately need to do.

 What Walter describes would be a far better example for both of my children, and my husband, rather than the maligned ‘help’ I think I must give. I’ve asked God for guidance to let go of the fear that undergirds the subtle things I do and say in my desperation to protect and rescue and manage that teardown people and relationships rather than build them.

So I begin this Advent asking God to come near to me so that I might get carried away from my fear to do obedient things that I haven’t done before—kingdom things that I didn’t think I had in me.