The Return of Joy

Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Psalm 30:5

I am happy to report the return of joy. I celebrated and preached this morning...and if there is something that this is not a cure for, I have yet to find it! The sermon left the pages with the Spirit and sang, as sometimes it is blessed to do, and I am grateful for that. We were a little bunch of hearty souls, blown in on a cold wind, but we welcomed a young man from Kenya who is a student at the college and a woman from North Carolina here visiting her son who always worships with us when she's in town. The energy was warm and alive with the sense that Incarnation is immanent!

I actually found myself beginning to feel incipient joy returning yesterday. The ease with which the sermon almost wrote itself, the day spent in happy productive ways....time hanging out with C doing wardrobe and tech things for her Christmas Eve service, gettting ready for and hosting the dinner bunch, all were parts of this. As was the sense, as some of my friends here and elsewhere have pointed out, that I did what I needed to do with this....talked, cried, prayed, moved through and with it.

Today after service M and I firmed up the plans for the Christmas Eve late service which we will celebrate together. We made a last minute anthem change to one of the lovely things we sang at Lessons and Carols (a very good choice IMHO!) rather than trying to sing a less familiar and harder song. At the five we will sing another lovely anthem (with a different choir configuration) that we also know from years past. I think we are getting it...work smarter, not harder!

The rest of the day today will be all those last minutey things...gift wrapping, do my Heifer gifts, I may even make it to yoga by five! Tomorrow, weather permitting I will go up to the jail to see L in the afternoon, then it's Christmas Eve and church abounding.

So while the winter winds howl ferociously outside on this last Sunday of Advent, I am warm of heart, and dare I say...even a bit fizzy again....Thanks be to God!