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An Advent Meditation and an Advent Invitation
79 Plays1 year ago
On this episode, Wendy shares an original Advent poem, and she and Chris talk about some of the formative lessons they have had to learn about "waiting well" during the tougher seasons of their marriage. Wendy also shares details about an upcoming half-day Advent Retreat that she is offering for women seeking community and encouragement during a time of waiting and wresting.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Theme
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Surviving Saturday, a podcast about holding on to hope in the midst of life's difficulties, disappointments, and dark seasons. Times like that remind us of the agony and despair the followers of Jesus felt on the Saturday of Easter weekend, in between the Friday on which he was crucified and the Sunday on which he rose from the dead.
00:00:23
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That someday forever changed the way that humans can relate to God. But what does it look like to be honest about the very real pain we experience in the in-between? To fervently cling to hope in the God who promised us his peace and his presence at times when he feels distant or even cruel.
Meet the Hosts: Wendy and Chris Osborne
00:00:40
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I'm Wendy Osborne, a licensed counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm her husband, Chris, a marriage mediator, conflict resolution coach, and trauma-informed story work coach.
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Join us each episode for authentic conversations about how life not turning out as we'd expected has created the contextual soil for the growth of a tenacious hope in the resurrection and in a God who is still making all things new.
Advent: A Time of Waiting and Hope
00:01:07
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Hey there, folks. So for this episode of the Surviving Saturday podcast, we actually realized we're coming up on the holidays here and what we in the Christian church call the Advent season. And we realized that the theme of Advent, which is
00:01:24
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the time when people are looking and waiting for the coming of Jesus Christ. You've heard all the different songs about it and all. We realize that that concept of waiting in a world that's waiting for hope to come in a different form really matches up with a key principle of the Surviving Saturday podcast. A lot of the concept of Surviving Saturday is about
00:01:45
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How do we learn to wait well rather than giving up on hope, giving up on desire, giving up on what we want, going into despair, or rather than numbing out and just kind of acting like we don't have hope or want, or rather than taking matters into our own hands and trying to make things happen and fix situations. What does it look like instead to wait, to wait with hope and to wait expectantly?
00:02:13
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And so with that in mind we wanted to offer a bit of an Advent meditation and then after that an Advent invitation that Wendy will tell you about. The meditation first is going to be a poem that Wendy had an opportunity to write about a year ago.
00:02:32
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And so why don't you share your poem. This is a poem that Wendy wrote actually called Conjugating the Resurrection. And as you listen to this, we invite you just to listen to it expectantly. What does it stir up in you? What do you feel as you hear it? What resonates? And we'll talk about it a little bit after she reads.
00:02:51
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OK, thanks.
Wendy's Poem: A Meditation on Waiting
00:02:52
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So this is, yeah, poem I wrote about a year ago as I was contemplating waiting again. You came. I've heard the stories since my youth. You descended from heaven humbly, not to be seen, but to see.
00:03:13
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Not to claim the power you are due, nor to demand vengeance, or to withhold the blessings we are not due. You came as the offer of sacrifice, living and dead. Tales of old are easy for my body to digest, I believe.
00:03:35
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You will one day return to finish what was started in the beginning. You will usher in what is yours into a new heavens and a new earth. Your tender fingers will soothe the skin onto your stained faces.
00:03:50
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You will wipe the strands of hair wet from weeping off of the foreheads that belong to devastated hearts. My body is able to metabolize these far off expectations. The slow simmer of years expects a tenderizing of the fears and doubts that I cannot stomach in the present moment. I believe.
00:04:16
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Yet in this present darkness I sit and wonder, are you coming now, today? While my soul struggles to contain the blood gushing out of my body after hard fought for hope has been severed,
00:04:35
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while my whole being aches with profound disappointment that stems from the absence of things and ways I would sure would be here now to comfort me. As I miss out on places I long to be loved and embraced. In times when I had expected a seat would be prepared for me at the table,
00:04:59
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One with a setting that could hold all that I bring. All the life that is my family, all that is me, is never provided.
00:05:09
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I believe and I don't believe. I am indecisive. I need you to give me hope and trust, not only that you have come and that you will come, but also that you are here with me as the seconds of now tick by, that you come over and over and over every single hour of every day you create.
00:05:36
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I ask for faith to believe that your resurrections are many and that while they are seldom as complicated as I make them seem, they are trustworthy and true and endlessly repeated. They call me back to the mercy and the honor that are yours for me.
00:06:00
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Well, thanks for sharing that. You're welcome. What are you feeling as you read that? Like, are you connected to it? And if so, how?
Emotional Reflection and the Child of God
00:06:10
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Yeah, I remember writing it and just being in a season of longing and in a season of loneliness. And so I can feel that even in my chest right now, just the wanting
00:06:27
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to be held and embraced and The disconnect that can happen between what I know scripturally to be true about the then and the to come But my body lives in the now and it's painful. Yeah, you remind me of I was actually at a
00:06:50
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a retreat recently, the Samson Society Summit actually, and a guy named Aaron Porter was giving kind of a message and he made a powerful point similar to that. He asked everybody to like rate with your fingers, you know, it was in person so you could hold up a number of fingers, one to 10, how much do you intellectually believe this sentence? I am a child of God dearly loved by my father.
00:07:18
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Do you believe that is a true statement? Rate yourself 1 to 10. And then he said, okay, now I want you to do a different rating. Rate yourself on how much do you feel like that's true? How much do you relate to and live as if I know
00:07:34
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I am a child of the father and he delights in me. It's different. Yes. And he said, did anybody's number go up? And no, the answer had not. Almost everybody's number was lower than their intellectual level belief. And then he said this sentence, which really just stopped me in my tracks. He said, the gap between those two ratings is the devil's playground.
00:07:59
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oh yeah that makes sense i was totally like just caught in that because um like you have had this intellectual experience this knowledge i can tell you scripture i can tell you truth i know the right things to say but when i'm making decisions when i'm trying to
00:08:17
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you know, decide what I'm doing with my day or how I'm gonna engage with you or a child of ours or a person that I have to deal with or get to deal with, that gap comes into play. If I am not feeling that connection, if I'm not operating as like, really, I'm a child of God, we sing it in a worship song, lots of worship songs, then not feeling that really changes how I show up. Would you say that's a fair statement? Absolutely, yes.
The Burden of Hope and the Skill of Waiting
00:08:47
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And do you hear I guess in the counseling room people wrestling with that same sort of Dilemma of you know knowing and knowing I should be hopeful and I want to have hope and yet here I am in the daily grind
00:09:02
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Yeah, I think we heap this idea of hope on ourselves like a heavy burden. Like it is similar to faith. It is something that I feel like God gives us to sustain. And there's a lot that happens in the wrestling of the owning that my hope is faltering, that my hope is deferred, that as Proverbs says, my body feels physically sick.
00:09:28
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And so, yeah, I mean, people I talk with every day are waiting. They're waiting for a child to be conceived. They're waiting for medical results. They're waiting to see a sobriety of some sort will take hold.
00:09:47
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They're waiting for a child to mature in some way and learn to regulate a system of emotions or behaviors. They're waiting for a marriage to turn the corner. So I mean everybody is waiting.
00:10:08
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And it strikes me as you say that that was a skill, I would call it a skill now, but it's not one that we had early on in our marriage at all. When we would hit conflict, when we would hit these really difficult patches that were undoing in some ways, and we'll talk about those on other podcast episodes, but when that happened, it didn't feel like either of us knew how to wait well. I remember somebody giving us that sort of encouragement, it might have been John Pierce or somebody saying,
00:10:38
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what would it look like to wait well? And we're like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? Like there are times when you have to sit in the powerlessness of here's something I can't fix. I really want it to be different. And maybe I've tried a number of things to try to make it different in my own strength and coming to the end and realizing I can't, this is not a fixable problem if it's a bad diagnosis, if it's a relationship that's ending or navigating betrayal, whatever.
00:11:07
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Those unfixable problems you know you know me i hate unfixable problems i hate things that i can't research or think or or talk my way out of and for me especially sitting. Often involves waiting often involves silent being silent you don't like silence i do not like silence i've gotten more comfortable with it now.
00:11:29
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But I remember a lot of that early counseling work had to do with, can I do something other than go just on a spin in my head? I gotta fix this, I gotta make this better, what can I do? Whether it's powering up or shrinking down, running away, I've got all kinds of ways to not wait. And yet, when you realize they're ineffective, they're not working, they're not helping the situation. Sometimes I remember being left with,
00:11:57
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all I can do is wait and try to figure out, okay, what does waiting well look like? I need to cry out to Jesus. I need to actually cry out and say, can you hold me? Can you give me what I'm desperately wanting and not getting, whether it's relationally or in life? I've been in a season recently just as I'm navigating this whole career transition and there's been lots of waiting, lots of trying different things or applying for things or
00:12:27
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Trying to you know figure out direction vision and and just many many You know days and days of waiting either waiting on somebody else or waiting on an answer.
Advent Event Announcement and Services
00:12:38
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I don't do it well So that's sort of our advent meditation
00:12:42
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And we also mentioned we'd like to issue an Advent invitation. We won't ordinarily do this. We're not going to sell something on every podcast. But Wendy does have, you have an opportunity coming up that you're doing with a friend, another counselor in town. Why don't you tell folks about that, this Advent opportunity to kind of practice waiting together.
00:13:03
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Yeah, so one of my dearest friends, the lovely Danielle Hughes is a counselor in Charlotte and we are partnering together on Saturday morning, December 16th.
00:13:19
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That is for reference the Saturday morning closest to the Winter Solstice, which is the darkest day of the year. And we chose that with a great purpose because we want to invite women and we're keeping the group very small.
00:13:36
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But we want to invite women to come and sit together contemplating the darkness that we may be walking in. Some of those places that I mentioned were waiting earlier. And so we're going to come together. There's going to be an opportunity to do some personal reflection with some prompts around what you're waiting for.
00:14:02
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what it's requiring of your body and your community to wait with you. We're going to do some Lectio Divina combined with just general stretching yoga and some experiential rituals just to mark our bodies and the pain of waiting.
00:14:22
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and the deference of hope. And we're gonna also enjoy a really good lunch together. So there are scholarships available if that would help. And so if you're interested, there is an Eventbrite and if you haven't received that, then reach out to me and I will get that to you. But we're super, super excited to offer this opportunity.
00:14:51
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That email address is wendy at nurture counseling dot net. Yep. So we appreciate you guys being with us and we hope you'll join us again for the next episode of the Surviving Saturday podcast.
00:15:04
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The Surviving Saturday podcast is brought to you by Nurture Counseling PLLC, a counseling teaching and training center based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We help families flourish one story at a time. Nurture Counseling provides counseling, counseling intensive for couples, conflict resolution coaching, story work groups, seminars, workshops, and retreats to provide a safe and welcoming context for exploring the agonizing experiences of pain, brokenness, and evil that disrupt our lives.
00:15:31
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and that God often uses to nurture deeper trust and intimacy with Him and with each other. You can find us online at www.nurturecounseling.net