Is it possible to live expectantly without leaning on our expectations?
Mike and I returned in the wee hours this morning from spending nine days with our youngest son in the Lone Star state. When we departed five days before Thanksgiving, our home was still adorned with fall décor, the mantle strewn with a garland of leaves and pumpkins.
Yet upon our return, Christmas is now only three weeks away— time to spring into action!
Cue lowering the attic stairs to tote Thanksgiving up and bring Christmas down.
Quick shift to planning menus for holiday luncheons here at Peace Ridge for my Bible study and writers’ groups.
Cut to shopping local to support small businesses to fill our gift list.
Yet all I really want for Christmas (my two front teeth still being intact) is time, not action. Reflection, not retail. The presence of those I love in my home as well as my heart.
I want to hear the bells.
The holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” is famous, among other things, for the line immortalized by little Zuzu Bailey: “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.” Questionable theology aside (don’t angels already come equipped with appendages allowing them to go airborne?), it’s a charming thought.
My strongest memory of the function of bells is from a darker time, though—September 14, 2001.
On that Friday, President George W. Bush called for a National Day of Prayer in response to the terrorist attacks three days prior. At the time, Mike was the senior pastor of a nearly two-hundred-year-old church on Cape Cod that was surrounded by shops in the heart of our village. How could we let the townspeople know that our government was calling us together to pray?
The answer lay high up in our white colonial steeple.
As the sound of our church bell peeled across the village at noon sharp, shopkeepers locked up and residents left their homes to pour into our sanctuary. No matter that some were Catholic and others Protestant, Jewish, or without a religious affiliation. On that day, we were one nation under God, indivisible, united by deep sorrow and deeper faith.
And two weeks later, the bell called us together again to bury one of our own – a local flight attendant who lost her life on Boston’s American #11.
At other times our church bell rang in celebration.
Every December 24th as close to midnight as we could muster, our family of seven made the narrow climb into the belfry to pull the rope installed two centuries before. As the heavy bell gathered momentum, its tintinnabulation floated over the darkened village announcing that Christmas Day had come once again.
That same instrument was both a symbol of tribulation and jubilation.
On Christmas Day of 1863 in the midst of the bloodiest conflict our country has known, a famed poet reeling under his own losses penned words we continue to sing today:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
Stay tuned (see what I did there?), as we’ll unpack the remarkable story behind these words next week.
As we enter Advent season, I’m thinking of those of you who’ve celebrated events both wild and sweet this year – new marriages and newer babies, jobs found or happily surrendered to retirement, families reunited who once were estranged.
And I’m praying especially for those of you who are ending this year in painful places under the strain of caregiving or conflict, in the long slog of illness or lack of forgiveness, or smarting from the cutting edges of sharp words and sharper fears.
In the middle of it all, I pray you hear the bells—a ringing reminder of hope.
It’s your turn. Do you have a favorite memory including bells? Please share in the Comment section below!