Anticipation

It's a vacation day, yet I wriggle restlessly within my blanket. I aggressively close my eyes to demand some sort of rest. It doesn't come. I resign to my 'awakedness' and stumble into the kitchen to make coffee.

The sun has barely made an impact through the five windows encircling my living room, reminding me of and further frustrating my absence from my Christmas Adam lie-in. I sit in "my chair" and roll my eyes in amusement that I am twenty-seven years old and I have "a chair".

While holding my warm coffee cup adorned with my favorite North Texas skyline, I silently look at our Christmas tree. I scan the room taking in the sights of our Yuletide decor, but mostly I absorb the silence. I appreciate it and yet I am wistful for its consumption one day by the sounds of a growing family, a child or children to shatter the silence.

We've been blessed with one. Her life is growing away from us, as maturing, healthy lives should.

Now we wait for our next. This kind of waiting is foreign to me. How do you wait for a life? Never having conceived and nurtured for nine months, I don't know how this anticipation is supposed to work out. Does each day yield new certainties or simply breed further unknowns? We have presently not been allotted nine months of known preparation. Instead, we stare down the barrel of any day now.

How does one prepare? I suppose you don't. Diapers, a crib, formula, clothes, money... they will come in time, as needed ...I hope.

Love... we have lots of love... and anticipation... we've much anticipation. And trust? Well, we are working on that.

Anticipation is anxiety redeemed, so I embrace it as a gift.

This fluttering in my gut and thumping in my chest are rhythms of grace and redemption, the gorgeous prelude to one of the Composer's finest pieces... a Symphony of Anticipation, a life entrusted to us as its glorious crescendo.

His willingness and ability to redeem astounds me. My selfish, wretched heart, he is redeeming into that of a mother's. My "goodness" sits as filthy rages, but his blood has redeemed them into sweet fragments of sanctification. This silence in which I sit, to be redeemed into joyful noise, and then one day back into much needed silence. He's redeemed this restless morning into a time of worship. My habitual slavery to anxiety he redeems into sweet anticipation, a story this great Author has written before.

I sit in my chair with great anticipation for a child. Yes, the one my heart will love as if from my own flesh, but also for the child who humbled himself to earth. The one who stooped to the confines of time to redeem the broken. The child born to die. I long for him as so many did those thousands of years ago when God redeemed that silent night with celestial choruses and a screeching infant. How Mary must know of the redemptive beauty of anticipation. I sit and behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, born as a baby, ushered in with great anticipation and I eagerly wait.