Reflection For Advent (5): The Day of Preparation

I love visions, I love hope, I love living life with purpose, I love goals and dreams and intentions. But sometimes, maybe because I love the hidden inner castles so much, my heart does not leap for joy when God's response to my dreams is, "Prepare. Work. Be faithful in the little moment of now."

"But, God, look at the vocation that You laid upon my heart, the tower of all my aspirations."

"But, Sarah, look at the day that it is called today. It is a day of preparation that is not to be despised."

Here I must be silent because, Dear Lord, You understand the labor of preparation.

To prepare means to be conceived in the womb of a young maiden. To prepare means to be fed through the umbilical cord of Your creation. To prepare is to humble Yourself to descend into this world through a cramped, tight and constricted passage. To prepare is to lie in a manger and know rejection because the Inn was too full for You. To prepare is to know hunger and to find nourishment from Mary's breast. To prepare is to flee with Your mother and Joseph to Egypt because Herod wanted to kill You.

God, you could have come to this Earth as a thirty-year-old man and avoided the day of preparation. You could have taught the people without ever having sat in the temple courts among the teachers at the Feast of the Passover. You could have fed the five thousand without having known the cramp of a stomach lacking food. You could have defended the condemned adulteress without having suffered Herod's condemnation. You could have raised a twelve-year-old girl from the dead and presented her to her mother without having experienced the love of a mother for her Son. You could have suffered the agony of the wood of Calvary without having suffered the loneliness of the wood of the manger.

But You didn't.

Thank You.