Waiting for Shannon

It's almost year's end, and even though life seems incredibly busy, there's still time to be made for one more holiday best, when sisters and nieces come from out of town, and little boys, brimming with car fever, pile out onto the driveway looking bigger and somehow wiser, and frazzled grownups pile out, too, looking a year older than they did ten hours prior. I find myself in a fragrant kitchen working frantically to get everything in place for dinner. I walk to the front door and stick my head out and look down the street once, then twice, then three times. On the fourth trip, I stop and admire the evening light settling in with a glow that mirrors the glow in the fireplace and the lit candles and the little Christmas tree still standing on a table in the living room and the love of family. As the light fades, I watch anxiously for a car that seldom comes down our street.

In our search for purpose and a meaningful relationship with God, we work through cycles of change. The ebb and flow of holiday traditions remind us of that. The decorated tree is down; the annual parade has marched past; the craft show has sold out; the school plays have dropped their final curtain, and the New Year is almost upon us, but not every milestone of 2009 is overturned, yet, because right now, I'm watching down the street anxiously-- waiting for Shannon.

From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live; so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him-though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being.as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we too are his offspring.'  Acts 17:26-28