Is it finally time to be present? {christmas ... and the death of idealism}

the monthly letter

For almost two years, I’ve been trying to fit an old way of living into a new post-2020 world — forcing my chubby foot into a slipper that’s too tight.

Daydreams of earlier years fill my head more than I acknowledge. I hear songs released as recent as five years ago and I linger too long in nostalgia, thinking it can somehow bring back more leisurely days and simpler times.

But I’m starting to see the expiration date on blind, wishful thinking, and I’m finding new value in being present to the moment God is giving me. What I once valued — idealism — seems to be a hindrance to that presence.

I don’t think I’m alone in having my idealism go unchecked for … well, decades.

Several years ago, as our older kids became teenagers and their history of trauma (four of our seven were adopted and at older ages) couldn’t hide behind big bows and plastic smiles, I became increasingly despondent. I had big dreams for my family, big hopes for what restoration would look like in our home. I had a vision for His story — a thread through each of us — sewing us together and hiding the seams.

But I woke to a different reality, morning after morning.

I had a friend in my life gently point out that ignoring the distance between my big dreams for my family and where their feet actually trod ground was idealism. (Faithful are the wounds of a friend.)

But for most of my life, I admired people with ideals. I took notes on them — followed their ways. I pursued teaching from leaders that had their heads and dreams and visions in another world. It always felt better that way. (And wasn’t that godly? Wasn’t that living by faith, not by sight?)

I began to see the cost of idealism on my children’s faces. They needed a mom for where they were, not for where I wanted them to be. They needed to be held, not to be called higher and away from growing through their current moment. Their lives needed a representation of Jesus who came to hold hands, wash feet, and weep with His people.

And I began to realize the utter glory of God in flesh, within my home. Flashy dreams and visions didn’t carry nearly the weight that the long and the quiet listening, cuddling, nurturing did — for them. (Or for me.) There is a place and time for the big stuff, but when those flashy dreams and future visions become the entirety of a family culture, it crowds out space for the deep (but often slow) growth in God.

You see, idealism makes us want to skip steps. To cheat, even.

And in so doing, it’s our hearts that get cheated, as idealism defuses the power of real hope.

I lived with a low-grade dissatisfaction about my days — constantly comparing my circumstances to my (mostly unspoken) ideals. I thought I was sowing into a dream of God’s heart, but really I was trying to avoid feeling the pain of what wasn’t.

Some of you know this pain — working in a job that doesn’t deploy you as you’d hoped, living in a city that isn’t providing community, residing in a family where you feel alone, raising a child that isn’t living the dream you had for them, enduring a marriage that is hanging on by a covenant, and on and on.

“What isn’t” rarely gets named, and yet its power in and throughout our lives is unparalleled. Our cynicism, our sarcasm and biting remarks, our jealousy, our inability to celebrate another, our sleepless nights, our dry times in His Word, and our countless arguments … could they all be tied to what our life is not versus what we hoped it was?

But if it were named — if we stepped out of the idealism to name the parts of our life that aren’t what we want them to be — might there be another road?

For me, Advent can feel like the meal you spent days preparing — course after thoughtful, succulent course — only to bark your way through eating what you’ve prepared as you argue with the people you slaved for around that table. And idealism can keep us serving those courses, lighting the candles at the table, filling the air with music … and ignoring what contributes to the dinnertime arguments.

But this year, I want to see the feast of God’s advent as what’s right in front of me — yes, even the red-eyes and drawn faces and tired relationships and messy middles. Because if I can set aside the dream of “what could be” for the reality of what is … then I have a natural beginning with God. (Not to mention that when our dreams get stripped bare, and we forfeit the ideal in order to meet Him in the mess of what’s real in our homes and families and marriages and jobs, He begins to write His dream story for us.)

Friends, we are bone-dry in our conversations with God because we mostly know how to talk to Him from the place of our ideals — and He is the savior of the inn, coming to us as a blood-covered baby, more intimately aware of the mess we’ve been avoiding than we want to admit.

Wonder starts in the inn—yours and mine. Your struggling marriage, your wayward child, your fractured heart and unfulfilled dreams: this is the manger that cradles what will save you.

I’m turning the calendar on December and expecting to meet God, not in the beauty of my well-planned Advent, but in my “what isn’t” — in the gaps between my ideals and what’s real in my home.

It’s time to be present with what’s real.

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Some of us have lost heart but in our idealism, we don’t even know it. Perhaps it’s time to name that the outward — and inward — parts of your life that are wasting away, and start receiving what He has for you there.

I promise He has tender words for your mess of a life … if you’ll only just admit the mess.

Let’s find the wonder in Him all over again, this Advent.

{From this perspective, I’ve written an Advent Adoration email series — with videos and more thoughts like this — that is free to anyone who wants to meet Him in their mess of an inn … in the “real,” as our ideals go unmet this winter.}

With expectancy,

Sara