Normally, I'm a nocturnal creature who thrives on starlight, flirting with the waning moon, and crispy temps by the fire on my back deck. I come alive when everyone goes to bed and all is quiet and I can feel the subtle stir of the night breeze. My elusive, garbled thoughts come to expressible fruition under clear night skies.
I don't normally experience the wonders of dawn unless it is at the end of my nocturnal shift. Instead, I usually wake to find new mercies already applied and first experienced in my daily thanksgiving that I don't teach an 8:00am class.
Who knows why for the past 4 or 5 days, I've been up with the birds and have been out basking in the thick morning mist, contemplating the wonders of the other side of the spin.
Even last night, with hours of productivity planned for after the kids went to bed, I fell asleep fully clothed with my shoes on at 8:00pm and woke at 4:45 ready to tackle the morning. The kids had left me lying and went on about their evening before retiring on their own.
I guess it began with my 7:00am soundcheck on Thursday, and every morning since, I've been up and groggily and reluctantly ready for adventure. I've been to the river each morning before anyone else in the house stirred, and attempted to capture the sun breaking through the mist.
This experience on Sunday morning allowed me to process Sunday's Epistle lesson a bit more realistically, when we read, "The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. We must stop behaving as people in the dark and be ready to live in the light."
I'd been awakened in that way apparently. And when it happened again this morning, in the darkest moments before dawn, I had plenty of focused advent specifics to ponder. I stood on the dam yesterday morning and thought of the dark to the west over the water, and the light to the east on the solid ground. There is a divider between yesterday and today, but it is not as defined, or abrupt as this shoreline. We live on the bank, in a moment. A moment that is now – and we wait.
I'm an extremely symbolic and metaphoric person. I'm not very bright, we all know, so to get things through my dense grey matter, symbols, pictures, and metaphor is required. Perhaps I go overboard with it, but these things mean deeply to me, and I tend to find metaphor and connectivity everywhere.
I am a waiting person, a living metaphor for advent. I live in between times. I live between generations. I'm of the lost, over- looked, generation X, those slackers who call out in ignored, inaudible voices, from the dark, predawn moments, "wake up, the night is nearly over, morning is almost here." I live between midnight and dawn. I wait.
I wait patiently sometimes, and sometimes I jump the gun and get called back to the starting line. I go off-sides and get penalized 5 yards.
There is a gradient in those moments before the sun appears on the eastern horizon. There is a golden glow of promise that morphs from the darker sky to the west. We have a choice of slumbering in the western sky at morning, or looking to the dawn of what will come.
I’m ok with being an in-between, advent guy. I can stumble around groggily trying to find my feet and maybe wake some other folks too.
