Admittedly, I can get lost in the details. Such has been the case during two separate Amazon.com visits, searching for the perfect alarm clocks for my boys. Months ago, I spent some time I will never gain back trying to find an efficient, and yet aesthetic alarm clock for each of them. Two separate times I have closed down my browser with nothing saved to my cart. So, you can imagine my surprise on Tuesday morning when a random package from Amazon showed up at my door with 2 RCA alarm clocks inside.
I googled: How to figure out who sent me an amazon package without a receipt. I read how this could be part of a scam called brushing which could lead to a recipient being held legally liable for complying with drug trade, if packages like alarm clocks turn into narcotics. Bless, Google, bless. I rolled my eyes and called Amazon.
Turns out that these mystery alarm clocks were mistakenly sent instead of the books I had recently purchased. Crazily enough, though, those books had arrived the day prior. The woman at Amazon told me that since this was a mistake on their part, to ‘consider the alarm clocks a gift.’ Merry Christmas, boys.
The past few weeks I’d been on a slow and steady descent into the arid space of ungratefulness. During the month of November, when people are contemplating and articulating the things in life they are grateful for, I was crickets. Aware of my funk, I decided to retrain my synapse through bullet journaling 20 things a day that I was thankful for. I found it less than amazing how this practice required some serious mental gymnastics. How did I get to this place, I asked myself. I put in the discipline and training in seasons prior necessary to cultivate a thankful mind, and yet here I was again at ground zero. I have been in much more emotionally and physically pressing seasons, and yet gratitude wasn’t as challenging for me then as it was now. I confessed to close friends how I was not in a good head space; we prayed.
I realized that the weight of parenting, work, goals in the making, home renovations, graduations, etc...had encroached upon the places in my soul reserved for hope and rest. Here it was that I found myself; grouchy, resentful, and irritated at the budding shoots of entitlement. I decided to help reboot my perspective by not allowing myself anymore vexations about tomorrows. I will commit to looking only for the daily bread of todays.
2 hours later, the alarm clocks show up.
Then, yesterday, I sat next to my friend Renee Smith at the annual Women’s Council of Realtors Holiday Luncheon. The banquet hall was gorgeous, a Hallmark setting of pines and snow, filled with hundreds of men and women in our industry gathered to enjoy a holiday lunch, auctions, and awards ceremony. To her surprise, Renee won this year’s award for top strategic partner. The woman who took me under her wing, helped to network and develop me, was this year’s top award. Daily bread.
After the award ceremony, the auction ensued. The proceeds were raised for Dutton Farms. Dutton Farms is a local farm that ‘celebrates, educates, and employs adults with special needs.’ The founder Michelle Smither spoke about what having a child with special needs has taught her. Yes to every single word that came out of her mouth. Then Jenny Brown, Dutton Farm’s CEO, explained the program from an operations perspective. Dutton Farms has become a national benchmark for the creative solutions and programs they have implemented. Time stood still when she said how ‘Oakland County, in my opinion, is the greatest place for a person with special needs to live in, out of the entire nation.’ Flashbacks of 6 years ago flooded my mind; how I moved away from a people and place I knew and loved, to a land and a people I did not know. I remember the sting and surety of the calling to leave. At the time we had no idea of the severity and duration of what was happening with Whitney. We had no idea that we were being born into the special needs community. But here I was, 6 years later, such a different person, so many of the dots in my life connecting to this one moment. Years of provision setting course behind the scenes. Years of provisions I could not see.
I love, during the season of Advent, remembering the men and women bound to the lineage of Christ, their failures and triumphs included. It freshly awakens me to the brokeness and vulnerability we all share as a human race, despite miles, cultures, and the epochs that divide us. I take comfort and find hope when I am focused on the bigger picture...not in the ideologies of perfect health, an Instagram worthy home, and a mess-free life...but in remembrance that Christ became our eternal healing, our redemption, our way of escape from bondage into freedom. He is bread, and wine, and living water. He is the Provision, and yet, the One who still provides.
The theme Advent most speaks of, the meditations of the macro-story, can be summed up in that one blessed word: provision. God was making a way, during seasons of silence, through generations of dysfunction, past the limitations of human efforts, to call His children home.
In this Season, I pray that your hearts would be softened and strengthened by the love of God, and the story of a most unlikely and vulnerable birth, filled with characters and events that capture the range of human existence. May you be uniquely reminded that He is making a way, sometimes obvious, sometimes not, to orchestrate and bring forth his holy life in and through and around you. And may you see your daily bread, each day, waiting there to find and feed you.
Grace & Peace my friends…
Jenn
