I get more giddy about New Year’s Day than I do Christmas.

It’s not that the birth of the Champion of the World into our helpless midst doesn’t make me shut my mouth in wonder and gratitude. It does. This is different.

Giddiness is what my kids feel when the packages start showing up under the tree. It is the sugar-induced high they achieve after slathering themselves and their cookies with icing all afternoon. It’s glee, and it’s the feeling I get when I bust open my new calendar with all those days of wide open spaces, waiting to be written on. It’s the high of the blank page, where all things are possible, and might possibly be planned.

I choose to believe I am not alone in this.

This New Year Effect lasts long enough to get me through un-decorating, scraping icing off of my kitchen floor, and dealing with the holiday hangovers of my elves. Almost. Because life is, as that Beatle sang, what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Reality may get suspended by the holidays, but sooner or later it will settle back down around me. Or, as they sang in the 70′s as well: What goes up, must come down.

There is the stack of cereal bowls in the sink, the buzzer from the dryer, there are the questions still unanswered, the relationships still in need of work. I begin to resent all the plans I myself scribbled on my calendar. There are good times and wonders to celebrate to be sure, but there are days where the winter light falls harsh on the brown grass as I pull into my driveway, and I chafe against the things that I long to be different. A restlessness surfaces, remains.

These are the days between Christmas and Easter. They are what the Book of Common Prayer calls Ordinary Days.

This is where we live. In the “for now” part of 1 Corinthians 13:12. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, – “

For now, we live in the space of a comma, where spiritual realities appear dim.

We want to be fixed rather than transformed, because it hurts sometimes. A lot.

The cradle morphs into a cross, and Easter seems like a dream.

We travel between war-torn London and Narnia. Aslan’s land is very close, but very far indeed.

But, there are wonderful plans afoot, we’re told. These are plans not of our making, plans beyond our most brazen dream or fondest hope. Plans are at work, right now,for a Grand Reunion, a wedding feast. Other plans. After the comma.

” – but then face to face.” We will look into the eyes of Jesus, and be complete.

Meanwhile, life happens.
Meanwhile, there are those cereal bowls, and the laundry.
Meanwhile, there are those questions and relationships.
Meanwhile there is pain and chafing, gratitude and giddiness.
Meanwhile, there is the Spirit in us, and there is faith, hope and love.
Meanwhile, we have each other.

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