artwork by Erica Tighe of Be A Heart Design |
One year ago I was numbly picking up the pieces of a broken dream when my friend Jenna Guizar called. Not long before, our family of five had packed up and moved to start an (admittedly, poorly planned) house of hospitality—only to return two months later when it became painfully clear that it wasn't sustainable. The house itself had been a small dream, but it was the larger, older dream that contained it that fell so hard: the dream of doing something big, radical, and impactful with my life. The dream I was sure we were headed for when we said "I do" a dozen years ago and that had disappointed me more times than I could count along the way. That dream died—at least, it felt like a death to me, though no one quite understood why. But I had seen my own littleness, and I grieved the woman I would never be.
When Jenna called to ask if I would write the 2018 Blessed Is She Advent Devotional, I was making healthy steps toward believing that maybe my small little blip on the radar of human history wasn't so insignificant after all—radical though it wasn't. I was writing a book, part spiritual memoir, part theological nonfiction, and I saw God in the surprise that was. I was also nearing the end of another pregnancy, marveling at the astonishment of being a co-creator of an actual human life.
A little book and a little baby: bit parts in the Divine narrative, but parts to play nonetheless.
I groaned and labored and brought forth my son on the day after Christmas, the feast of the first Christian martyr, and I laughed in the face of a death that couldn't steal life. Week after week, month after month, that baby nursed and napped as I punched key after key, forming words and shaping meaning that would never change the world but might just change me.
Some days I wrote the Advent book; some days I wrote the little book on weakness. Some days I felt called; most days I felt uncertain. Every day I felt grateful.
I began to observe the people in my life—the women, especially—who toiled and sweated to bring forth something out of nothing in their own ways. I began to notice that God was there, in that labor: God in the nothing, God in the something, God in the in-between.
They were bearing Light. They were bearing God.
The Latin phrase imago Dei means "image bearer," and we are each that: formed in the image of God, Genesis 1 tells us, passively imbued with a dignity unparalleled in creation. But so, too, are we active bearers of the image of God in the world: already, and yet still more to be, in ways smaller and more profound than we expect or believe.
This bringing forth of God is the central point of Bearing Light, the Advent Devotional that has finally come into being. Using treasured traditions of the Church—the Visitation, the Magnificat, Lectio Divina prayer, and three powerful female saints—we will walk through this Advent season exploring what it means to be both made in the image of God and called to birth God into the world.
This book is an offering to all of us who have lost our way and need to find it again. It's for us who question our worth. It's for us who thought we were stronger than this. It's for us who dreamed of changing the world and are finding ourselves the ones changed instead. It's for us who whisper "yes" to God on our pillows at night, having no idea what it means. It's for us who have been so busy under our roofs we've forgotten there is a waiting world outside of it.
We are light bearers; image bearers. And this Advent, we will carry our candles the long way home. We'd love for you to join us.
Get your Bearing Light Advent Devotional here.
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