On weekdays during Advent we are posting the daily reflection from our Abundance Advent booklet here on our blog. You can download the booklet in its entirety here.
Earlier this year, we experienced a few tough months. It was a time of oxymorons, because while some parts of life were stressful, other pieces of the same situation were delightful. Similarly, God’s gift of abundance was present even as we felt drained, worn, and rattled. God made Himself visible in what was, without a doubt, the hardest part of our year. Because it was so hard, there were moments daily that we asked God to heal and fix the situation. But He didn’t. And I think one of the results of those long months was that we were given the opportunity to rely on God, not ourselves. We were exhausted, but we also glimpsed hope and help along the way. We were given the chance to let friends carry us just for a bit. For our kids to see us ask Jesus for His help.
Of course, what happened is what always seems to happen—this Presence and Comfort could be mistaken for mundane coincidence. The abundance God gives isn’t terribly supernatural. It’s a man with wise counsel. Friends with time to listen late into the night. Pizza delivered by a friend when we’re too distracted to feed our children. An unexpected afternoon nap to calm my frenetic brain. I could go on and on because God’s care for me was so sneaky and omnipresent, if I hadn’t known it was God, I would’ve thought, “well, I’m glad that didn’t go worse.”
I’ve seen it happen differently, though. When I needed God’s care to be less subtle and more bold. Times of abundance that looked like: a miraculous gift of my unborn child being healed in utero. No more signs of the sickness, the deformity. That abundance was flashy, almost. Maybe that year I needed God to write in giant letters so I could see His love. I don’t know. But this year, the sickness of life was not taken away from us. The mystery is that I experienced God’s mercy and goodness while simultaneously experiencing the brokenness of life.
I imagine that you could ask me: if God gave you His abundance in the midst of that difficult time, why didn’t God just go on ahead and take it and make it disappear? Because wouldn’t that have shown His presence even more amazingly?
Frederick Buechner, in his memoir Telling Secrets, speaks about a hard season in his family’s life saying, “I believe the blessing of God was indeed crowning our house in the sense that the sad and scary things themselves were, as it turned out, a fearsome blessing.” It’s a fearsome blessing to me, personally, to have to be vulnerable about my stress and need for help in front of others. And when every day is hard, my focus on the gifts in my life becomes sharper. Buechner, in the same book, also says, “I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way.” For better or worse, that ragged season in our family’s life is over. I phrase it that way because I have ambivalence about how easily I slip back into nonchalance and indifference when life gets easy again. I’m less aware of God’s abundant love in my life. It’s embarrassing, actually, that the fearsome blessing of hard things draws me closer to My Father. It’s comforting, too, though! There is comfort in knowing that in the easy days and hard days, stressful situations and refreshing ones, I am covered by God’s gift of abundance.