Today's blog post is written by a friend and colleague of mine. Since I've met her, Jackie has spoken of her celebration of advent through serving others, and teaching her children to do the same. I asked her to write about the ways in which her family serves during advent, and why. While I'm not Catholic, her heart of kindness and service resonates with me and far exceeds the box in which so many of us place religion. In a year of hate, uncertainty and chaos, we need kindness, love, compassion and service more than ever...
Follow me on Instagram as I'll be sharing an act of kindness to complete each day! @backroadsandbutterflykisses
By Jackie Koch
Christmas is a special time of year for our family. We get to celebrate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and that means getting together with our extended family, food, presents, fun, and of course Mass.
As a Christian, I was taught to know that there is a season before Christmas begins that is all about the preparation for Christmas, called Advent. Advent means “the arrival”. We learn what it meant to prepare and wait for Jesus’ arrival which we celebrate on Christmas. Advent begins the fourth Sunday before Christmas until Christmas Day. We celebrate it both through going to Mass and with an Advent wreath here at our home. Each Sunday at Mass, a new candle is lit for the duration of Mass. The four candles on the Advent wreath symbolize hope, love, joy and peace. The third candle is pink for joy. The other three are purple. Sometimes there is a white candle in the middle which is called the Christ candle. It is only lit on Christmas to remind us of the light that Jesus brings to the world. All the candles are lit sequentially. Our family Advent wreath is kept on our kitchen table and we take turns lighting the candles for each dinner. Chaos usually ensues when the kids argue over whose turn it is to blow out which candle.
I was born into the United Methodist Church. I married into the Catholic Church and raise my children as Catholics. Methodists celebrate Advent but not quite to the extent that Catholics do. Something that stuck out to me growing up was when my church handed out Advent idea bags in Sunday School that featured ideas of kind things to do during Advent. The ideas were not large, but rather focused on kindness and taking stock of all your blessings you’ve been given. It gave you a chance to recognize your blessings and be grateful for them. For example: Count how many pairs of shoes you own and donate a dime for each pair. Count how many televisions or computers you own and donate a quarter for each. Write a thank-you card to your mailman. Help serve a meal in the soup kitchen.
These ideas stuck with me growing up. Service and kindness towards others have always been virtues that my parents have preached all year long. I knew that when I had my own little family that I wanted to continue to teach those things to my own children especially during the Advent Season. As a new mother, I had big ideas on what I wanted to do with my own children vowing to make Advent extraordinary! I’m raising Saints by the way and I can’t do that with just an ordinary “Let’s only celebrate Christmas” deal. (Your eyes should roll upon reading this. I know mine do.) I was quickly getting frustrated with the commercialism of Christmas and angry that “Advent Calendars” for kids were solely about opening a new piece of chocolate each day. If the Church wants me to teach my children about Advent, then why can I not find something that is more than star shaped chocolates for them? Also, I may have been setting myself up for failure by not giving myself grace about the realities of parenthood I was navigating.
I searched the internet and Pinterest for exceptional ideas on how to “do Advent” the correct way as a parent. This should be easy, right? Nothing seemed to be exactly what I wanted. I wanted to teach Advent to my kids in a way that their little hearts would be so filled with Jesus that by the end they would become Saints! Big mommy goals, right? (Again, insert eye roll) This was about the point where I grew so frustrated that I ended up eating humble pie and realizing that as a parent, there’s a good chance you’re not going to do things right the first time, or the second, or ever, but all that matters is the intention of your plans and actions. I want to teach my children about Jesus. How do I do that? I wasn’t called to be a teacher, directly. I was called to have a servant’s heart though. It also takes a village to raise a child and as a parent, I do the best I can...most of the times….some of the time. I rely on my village with my children. I choose whom to be part of my village and they are a bunch of flawed, Jesus-loving, kind-hearted people who want to see me succeed and my children succeed.
So to take my own advice and give myself some grace when it comes to parenting, I had to be okay with not knocking Advent out of the park on my first go around (or ever really. The intention is there and that’s all that matters). I also relied on my community for help. I found an Advent Nativity scene on Amazon that featured little doors that you could open each day in December. Each door featured a piece of the Nativity you add to the scene each day (and yes, my children argue about who gets to open today’s door so they have to come up with a system of sharing….perish the thought!). I have also added a slip of paper with that day’s act of kindness.
I wanted to combine something I grew up doing, Acts of Kindness, with my love for the Church and understanding Jesus more. Let me explain. I grew up in the Methodist church but ascribe to the Non-denominational Christian classification. I married a Catholic and our children are being raised Catholic. All this means is that we love Jesus and desire to know Him. We are raising our children in a Christian home and a Catholic church.
My desire was to create an act of kindness for each day and read a bible verse or passage directly related to the story of the coming of Christ. I wanted the act of kindness to be both big and small. If we only did big acts, we would get overwhelmed and quit right away. It’s not sustainable. Plus, Jesus didn’t go around preaching that only big acts matter. Love, in all shapes and forms, both large gestures and small, that cost money and don’t, all point back to Christ. I wanted to incorporate things that even my tiny kiddos could do and also let them be part of and witness things that they might not quite be old enough for yet, like blood donation. With that said, the brainstorming session began. I quickly realized that my goals were lofty but that was okay. My intent was to teach my children about spreading God’s love in tangible ways. It would be okay if we missed a day or had to reschedule something or had to come up with another idea on the spot.
Friends and family contributed ideas and each year is different from the last. Some ideas that worked well one year, might not work well others. This year especially has thrown a loop into what we are going to be able to do but that just means a little reworking on my part. This year has taught us that we need to be flexible, not to sweat the little things, and how to be resilient. Here are some of the ideas we have incorporated in our Acts of Kindness in our Advent Calendar in past years:
Bring a meal to someone
Make homemade popcorn and cranberry garland and hang them on graves at the cemetery
Sponsor a teacher
Pick up trash along roadside by house
Donate 10 cents for each pair of shoes we have
Donate 25 cents for every television, computer, tablet, or phone we have
Donate 50 cents for each vehicle our family has
Donate 25 cents for every vacation we’ve been on
Donate old toys and clothes
Donate food and personal hygiene items to a local food pantry
Donate blood - parents only
Make breakfast burritos and bring to local Sheriff department
Bring a meal to our Priest and church staff
Frost cookies with someone you don’t get to see often
Send a care package to a child in the hospital
Send a care package to someone currently serving in the military
Make homemade paper snowflakes and hands them out to residents in a local nursing home and visiting them
Make and deliver encouraging cards to members of our church who haven’t been out since the pandemic started
Donate food to local animal shelter
Donate items to the pregnancy resource center
Make cards for people at the local vet clinic who recently lost a pet
Bring breakfast for nurses and staff at the local Health Department
Make bird food and leave out for birds
Rake leaves/shovel snow for elderly neighbors
Say a prayer for those celebrating Christmas not at their homes or with others
Send a Christmas card to the child we sponsor each month
Pass out candy canes to people
Donate blankets to a shelter
Sign up and ring bells for the Salvation Army
Make and pass out chocolate covered pretzels
Go without electronics for a day
Bring a meal to someone who just had a baby
Make cookies for someone who has just lost a loved one
Help put food baskets together for a local food pantry
Invite a single person over for dinner
Write a thank you note to your bus driver and mailman
Volunteer to be a Meals on Wheels driver with the local Senior Center
Buy someone’s coffee or meal at the drive-through
This year we can especially identify with the hymn “O Holy Night”. These past eight months have served as an exhausting season of preparation for life on the other side of this Pandemic. Not knowing when our lives would be back to “normal” served as unnerving anticipation. What are we preparing for? What is our “new normal” going to look like?
For me, I find it no coincidence that by the time Christmas will have come this year, just over 9 months will have elapsed since we were first told to “Shelter in Place”. 9 months. That duration of time sounds vaguely familiar to me.
As a mother of three little ones, I find myself identifying with Mary during this season. Although I can never truly understand the incredibly complex, mysterious, awe-inspiring, blessing it was to carry the Son of God for 9 months, I do understand what it means and feels like to carry a child for 9 months...well 10 really. All 3 of my children were beyond overdue and needed to be evicted, a notice I was more than excited to give. These 9 months of enduring a Pandemic had me feeling so many of the same emotions that I felt during my pregnancies. Excited. Nervous. Terrified. Exhausted. Confident. Doubtful. Confused.
Advent is not only appropriate for this year; it is also NEEDED this year. I firmly believe this Pandemic was a time that God has been using to direct our heads and our hearts to Him. He is saying, “Do I have your attention yet?” We have been stripping our lives back to its basics. We are realizing that God has been calling us all along to focus on Him. All these other things we have in our lives are merely distractions that are taking up space in our hearts and heads where it should be filled with Christ. God has been speaking to us all along asking us to make room for Him. We have been found guilty of being innkeepers and telling Him that there is no room for Him here in the Inn, but here…you can have this small corner of our hearts. God has been using these 9 months to forcibly make space in our hearts. He has taken away all these other items that we have been giving glory to in our lives. Our schedules, our time, our activities, our heart priorities. They’re gone! Now all we are left with is God who we segregated to this tiny section of our hearts and only brought Him out during what we thought was Easter, Christmas, funerals, weekly Mass, etc. Now He is all we have left and He is asking for our attention. He is asking us if we finally have room for Him in our hearts. We are now faced with our own sinful, mortal desires. Do we joyfully acquiesce and give God the rightful place in our hearts and lives? Or do we dig our feet in the sand and continue to tell God that we can do this all on our own? That He can just go back to that tiny corner of our hearts and only come out when we feel like we need Him?
Our world is exhausted. Navigating this Pandemic on our own is clearly not working and it is draining all of us of our sanity. We need a reason to rejoice. We NEED Advent. Not only do we need a reason to celebrate but these past 9 months have made it abundantly clear that our souls are thirsting for something more. It is clear that on our own, we are failing as a society. We are tearing ourselves down and tearing each other apart. Without God, this is what we get. We get a world that doesn’t value each other as individuals and as perfect creations of the Father. We would rather spend time tearing each other down than we would building each other up and learning how to love one another. This is EXHAUSTING. The world has had enough! We NEED Advent. We NEED this season to focus our hearts and minds on Jesus. Yes, we could have been doing this all along but clearly doing things on our own is not working out. We all sin and we all fall short of the glory of God. We need God. Our weary and tired hearts NEED a reason to rejoice and I am going to purpose that this year, more than ever, we need the season of Advent to help us focus our hearts and minds on what really matters, God.
So to borrow a line from the aforementioned hymn I mentioned at the beginning of this, “Our weary world rejoices”. Let us take this time to explore the story of Jesus and how He came into this world; the story that Mary and Joseph and that scene in the manger would come to be part of. Everything was stripped away from them. They did not even have a proper place to stay or for Mary to give birth in. It was simple, uncomplicated yet amazing. From these humble beginnings came the Savior of the world. Wow! Let us spend this time truly realizing the whole story and what it means for us today. Now more than ever can we understand what 9 months of excitement, nervousness, confidence, doubtfulness, and terrified utter exhaustion looks like in a modern way. We are both in need of Advent, but ready for it. Let our weary souls rejoice! For unto us a child was born.
Bring on the hymns! Bring on the celebration! Advent, here we come!