Wreck This Journal

A few weeks ago I started participating in a group art project using the book, Wreck this Journal, which is a collection of prompts that inspire you to do various creative and destructive things.  It's been a blast to get out all my colored pencils and do things to a book that I never imagined that I would.

Follow this link to see a few things that I have done to the book.

Wreck this journal 2013

Why Advent?

Credit: Gregory Walter (Occupy Advent)

The season after Thanksgiving has a name, and it is not Christmas.  Despite what Target would have you believe, Christmas has not yet arrived.  I went to Target last night to pick up a few things, and found that the entire back half of the store seemed to have exploded into a veritable cacophony of red and green and glitter and ribbon and beads and baubles.


This Sunday, December 2nd, marks the first day of Advent.  Advent is probably my favorite season in the liturgical year.  It is the start of the church year, in which we wait with joyous expectation for the coming of the incarnate Christ on Christmas.

With regards to holiday seasons, Advent gets perpetually skipped over.  Christmas is more exciting.  It is more fun to rush through the season of waiting because we are bad at being patient.  We want gratification and we want it now.  It is more fun to surround ourselves with things that are red and green, flavored with peppermint, and that comfort us in the midst of the darkest time of the year.

Advent is a season of darkness.  It is before the coming of the promise of Christ.  Waiting in the darkness is pretty countercultural to us now, but it was also countercultural to the first century Israelites who received a king that they never expected.  They wanted a fine king, in the Davidic tradition, but instead they got a infant born in a stable surrounded by farm animals, to a carpenter and a teenage mother.  Not your typical royal stock. And Jesus continued to smash assumptions throughout his life and through even his death on a cross. So just like those who received Jesus Christ at his first coming, we too await the arrival of a king who comes quietly and unexpectedly in the darkest time of the year.

The Occupy Advent movement blog, and their FaceBook site, is an interesting place to start.  Advent is outside our cultural norms.  What does it mean to wait for a blessing that we cannot even comprehend? What does it mean to trust that the promise will be fulfilled even if we can't understand how or why?

Luther Seminary (my soon-to-be home, as of about January 10th, 2013) publishes a daily meditation guide for Advent.   You can download it here.  This is how I will be shaping my spiritual life in this season of waiting.

Advent Conspiracy

So every year for the past four years or so, in preparation for holiday gift-giving, I have been participating in something called the Advent Conspiracy.  Basically the concept is that the meaning of the season is somehow lost in the consumerism and buying of STUFF.  There is a video embedded below that describes this kind of alternative way to prepare for the holidays.  Black Friday makes me vaguely nauseated every year.  So I am vowing to not buy anything that day and spend time with people I love instead.

Essentially the idea is that instead of buying gifts for your friends and loved ones, you make them.  So I am getting started early this year with making presents.  There is something really profound about showing your love for someone with every stitch or bead or whatever.  So today I dug out all my yarn and knitting needles.  In addition to making gifts, you can also provide services for others.  Think like the coupon books that you made for your family as a child.  I especially love to cook for other people.  Just not for myself.  So I am planning on doing most of the cooking for my family while I am in Bozeman.  Hanson crew, get ready for falafel and tzatziki, chicken chili, pumpkin soup, quinoa, spaghetti squash, sweet potato enchiladas, and so on.  I also make lefse to eat on Christmas Eve.

So my gifts aren't always perfect, but I put a ton of myself into them.