Hot Showers and God's Gifts

Well, it turns out that I was led astray as far as snow goes.  Boo!  No snow whatsoever for me.  The older lady I was staying with and I were both disappointed.  But it did kind of bring home for me the fact that there IS joy in the anticipation of things-- even if they don't happen when we expect.  How weird is that?

I am kind of a weirdo when it comes to waiting for things.  Sometimes I am terribly impatient.  Sometimes I am really good at waiting.  Sometimes I am a bit fanatical about it.  Once, when I was leading a team for two months in Bangladesh, we stayed our last couple of weeks in a guest house that had hot water showers.  Such a luxury!  We had been showering in cold water up until that point, and there was not even a chance that we were getting the grime from the polluted air off of ourselves to a satisfactory level in the cold water. Some of my hair actually turned orange from the pollution while I was there.  And my hair is brown-- not blonde at all-- so that was quite the feat.

Anyway, when we finally stayed at this place with hot showers, I refused to take one for days.  I was kind of mad that we had the option of hot water, because I felt like I wanted to tough it out for as long as possible and really earn hot water.  My team would come out of the shower with exclamations of joy and washcloths black from the weeks of built-up silt scrubbed from their skin, but I held out.

One day it kind of hit me that I was being ridiculous.  I realized that there were no amount of cold showers that would cause me to suddenly "deserve" a hot shower.  A hot shower, in my situation, was total unmerited favor.

I think that's where I go astray when it comes to waiting for things sometimes.  I wait and wait and try to earn whatever it is I think I'm going to get, when in reality, that thing is a gift that I don't have to-- and can't-- earn, and I could have it whenever I wanted it.

When I finally took a hot shower, it was amazing.  Those weeks of cold water showers had definitely made me appreciate what I had been missing.  But as I watched the water running down the drain in pollution-black rivulets, I knew that this shower was no better or worse than it would have been if I'd had it a few days earlier or later.  It was good, that was sure, and I had missed out for a little while on something good, because of my own skewed perception.

So... is it a stretch to relate this story to Advent?  In this season of waiting and then of gifts, I hope for myself that I know how to separate the two.  The waiting is important-- it helps us to appreciate the gift more when it comes.  But the whole point is to be ready when the gift is there, so let us not miss that gift!  And when the gift of God is right in front of us, begging us to open our arms to it, let us accept wholeheartedly.  We will never deserve it.  But that's kind of the point.