Holy unraveling

Monday of the First Week of Advent

I lie down and go to sleep;
I wake again, because the Lord sustains me.
Psalm 3:4

I examine the pile of projects awaiting my attention as I set up the sewing machine. I am pretty sure it was over the summer when my husband asked me if I could fix the small tear in his jacket (which is no longer so small).

The hum of the machine soothes me as I repair the jacket, pulling the material together where it has escaped from a seam. I move on to re-hem a scarf to keep it from unraveling. And as I find sewing meditative, my mind wanders to God.

I think of myself, and of the times I am tattered and torn and about to unravel, in God’s hands. Being worked into something, someone, renewed. The Holy One envelopes all I do, all I am able. Even in something as simple and everyday as my waking and sleeping, it is God who sustains me.

In Advent, we are caught up in the holy paradox of expecting a new-born savior and the end of all time. The season compels us to glimpse the abyss, brave enough to contemplate the unraveling of the world, because of the promise that the end, like the beginning, rests not in our hands, but is bound up in the very fabric of Love.