Continuing the journey

We are in a season of Advent once more. In the Northern Hemisphere, the days are shorter and the nights grow long. In my little swath of the Midwest, snow and chilly weather abound, creating havoc at times. Read any newspaper or even scroll through the comments on social media and it seems that joy, peace, hope, and love are hard to come by.

But yet we continue on.

For most Christians, Advent is a journey that focuses on some characters in a far-off, still war-ravaged, little town. But I would venture to say that this season is a journey for all peoples everywhere, just as it is every season.

We are coming to the end of the year, where it seems as if everyone focuses on what has been accomplished in the past year. What has changed? What has stayed the same? What goals were met? What wasn’t accomplished? Am I a failure or a success? Is this a stressful exercise or one full of bounty? Where are we going?

Just like Advent, life is a journey.

Anyone who knows me face to face knows that my usual answer to the question “How’s it going?” is “It’s going. I don’t know WHERE it’s going, but it’s going.” And it’s true. My story keeps on getting written, word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. But I don’t always know where that story is going. It’s easier in my own books to decide where the journey will lead, since I make everything up….. but real life isn’t so simple. Life can be mapped out, but the roads on the map may be closed or one takes a different turn at the fork. And sometimes, looking back over the course of the chapter that is the year, we aren’t always where we hoped we would be. We aren’t as thin as we want. We haven’t saved as much as we wanted to. Friends and family we hoped to be celebrating with aren’t in our lives anymore, whether due to death or just drifting away.

But yet we continue the journey. We cling to the stories and traditions of yesteryear as we carve out our own paths in life. We break the chains of generational traumas as we remember the histories that created them. We forge on, traveling through this journey even if the roads we wanted to take aren’t high enough, lofty enough, straight or narrow enough to be the correct ones.

We continue the journey that started long ago because we are seeking to be wise enough to hope for better things. We seek to be better because we love enough. We seek to advocate for change because we want to be joyful enough. And we pray for an end to the strife because we want to have peace enough.

What are you journeying for?

Stay magical, friends.

Write your own story.

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