It’s December the first. And our first real snowfall of the year is flying by the coffee shop window. Why do snow and coffee make me want to blog? Maybe it’s the absence of anything frantically urgent on my to-do list…what a welcome change! (Not that the list isn’t there…just not frantic about it…)
So, driving to Huntington, I was thinking about Jon Swanson’s idea of Month Zero…using the month of December to get a head start on the new year. This blur of endings and beginnings is making more and more sense to me as I grow older. Perhaps it’s the number of dear friends I’ve said “good bye” to, one way and another. Perhaps it’s all the new aches and pains, which remind me of limitations, including time. All I know is that each day, while it brings new opportunities, is also a day closer to the end: the end of a job, a relationship, a life, all Time.
Advent marks the countdown to our celebration of Christ’s birth. Had Israel known His due date, they could have anticipated more fully the “beginning of the end” of their wait…it had been a long one, even longer than our two-thousand year wait for His second coming. But, as C.S. Lewis wrote to an American lady, near the end of his own life, “…we are here in the land of dreams. But cock crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.”
I want to live each day looking for the new opportunities it brings…especially those chances to talk to people about brevity of life and eternal hope. And I want to remember that every opportunity could be my last.
Happy Advent.
Winnowing...sorting the wheat and chaff of my thoughts 
Yes, I have been thinking this too–getting a start now seems so much more real than in January, when it tends to feel like a ritual of desperation. I have failed so many times. But to change now, in December, feels like real repentance. :o) If we can exercise self-discipline now, in the feast time of the year, we will enter the temptations born of January’s austerity in a place of strength.
I think.