deer liz
I have a newfound appreciation for reindeer.
My husband and I agreed that the first Saturday of Advent would be the day to decorate our Christmas tree. The tree itself was already up, and lights had been positioned for us by our indispensable girl Friday, Denise. But we needed to find a day to unpack the individual ornaments that we have lovingly collected over our 47 years of marriage.
That morning our grandsons stopped by our house. They pulled out some of the dress-up clothes that we keep in their playroom; and when they left, I found a set of antlers on the floor. Rather than stuffing them back in the bin, I donned them for decoration day.
The first thing I noticed was that I had no sense of the new width or height of my profile as I went through doors, ducked into crawl spaces and climbed up and down ladders with small and fragile baubles. How do deer navigate with antlers that that grow increasingly larger each wintery week?
Psalm 42:1 presents these hoofed ruminants this way: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul thirsts for the living God.” Deer are so much wiser about water than I am. Life depends on water. Thirst is the first sign of dehydration, so destructive to our bodies and even our minds. I don’t drink enough water….I’m busy, so I ignore the early warning sign of thirst. If I’m honest, much of the time I’m not really thirsting for God, either. Once when I was young, my pastor came to call. In the course of our conversation, I confessed that I was very disciplined about Bible study, but had difficulty incorporating prayer into my life. He made an inciteful observation: “Just because you don’t fit three proper meals into a day, you don’t avoid eating. If you’re hungry you grab food whenever you can get it. Perhaps you could consider what the obstacles are to feeling hungry for God.”
How about you? What are you thirsting for? Are you hungering and thirsting for God? If not, do you know why not? Do you wonder why nothing else you yearn for ever quite satisfies your yearning? What might you do to stimulate your thirst for God this Advent? Jesus is coming. He came once as a babe, and he’s coming back to make all things new. While we wait, we can get callous and blasé, or we can cultivate our thirst. We can take a lesson from the deer.
Love, Liz
Four things I am doing this Advent to stimulate my thirst for God:
- Daily Advent readings from frecklesandfortitude.com at our Advent wreathe
- Attending in-person church whenever able
- Listening to Christmas music at home and in the car
- Reading some of my favorite Christmas books…three that come to mind are Preparing for Jesus by Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Glorious Impossibles by Madeleine L’Engle and Santa’s Favorite Story by Hisako Aoki and Ivan Gantschev.
