Light first purple candle - The Hope Candle
How are you feeling today? Excited because you are starting a new job, yet nervous that you might make a rookie mistake? Exhausted because you have a newborn who is up every other hour to nurse, and then wants to play and coo for an additional hour, yet overjoyed at this darling miracle baby? Disappointed that an old friend hasn’t responded to the text you sent two weeks ago and confusion as you beat your head trying to figure out what you did to cause the “obvious” rupture? Grief and deep sadness as the anniversary of the death of your beloved grows closer, yet grateful that his physical agony is over? We rarely feel emotions in isolation. Instead, they are often mixed together. How can we experience all of these emotions at the same time?
If what we love and care about shapes how we feel, then we will live constantly with mixed emotions. This is a right response, to hold in tension what appears at face value to be conflicting emotions. In their book, Untangling Emotions, Alasdair Groves and Winston Smith propose that “life in this world means the delightful glories of God’s handiwork always get the muck of sin and suffering spattered on them. We have no choice but to both mourn and rejoice, and oftentimes simultaneously.” But that doesn’t seem possible or right to our finite bodies.
In today’s Advent reading, we have a front row seat to the muck of sin and suffering spattered all over the glories of God’s handiwork. Since the hard reset put in place with the birth of Seth, the generations have become progressively self-centered and wicked. God loves His creation, yet regrets the whole experiment! He decides to start over, with the one righteous man currently on earth. A man named Noah.
* Read Genesis 6-9:18 (I know, it’s a lot! If you only have time for a quick read today, read Genesis 6; 8:15-22; 9:12-17.)
I often do an Emotional Assessment with my counseling clients and ask them to name six emotions that they regularly experience and assign each a color. Just the thought of mixing some of those emotions’ colors together makes me a bit nauseous. We all know enough about color mixing to know that if you mix all three of the primary colors together, the resulting hue is a yucky brown - not a milk or even dark chocolate brown, but a color that forms a sour grimace on our face. Think for a second of all of the beautiful colors that existed on the earth before the flood - green grass, azure blue water, pink flamingos - all tossed together under the unending power of the floodwaters. Images that once brought smiles of joy to Noah’s face now are overwhelmingly depressing. He’s relieved that the flood is over and that the waters have receded, yet the drab dark brown devastation is expansive. How did Noah risk mixing these emotions? How do we? Perhaps instead of mixing colors, a better image would be marbleizing…
I had the privilege of homeschooling our four children for about 13 years as they were growing up. I have always enjoyed the creative arts and wanted our kids to experience every type of art form possible; therefore I attempted to weave them into as many unit studies as possible. We made paper machíer crowns and masks regularly, illustrated stories using Eric Carle’s mosaic form, and sculpted clay. One of the most interesting and quite frankly, most difficult art forms we attempted was marbleizing paper.
There are several methods for making marbled paper, but I opted for the beginner method, in which a shallow tray is filled with water. Next, a surfactant additive, such as melted wax or even shaving cream are added to the water to help float the colors. Lastly, various kinds of ink or paint colors are carefully applied to the surface. A toothpick or skewer is then used to move the paint blobs vertically, horizontally or both, creating a unique design and mixture of colors. Lastly, blank paper is placed directly on the surface, then lifted off and placed right-side up to dry.
The result is a gorgeous piece of art, in which several colors retain their original hue, yet sit nestled alongside one another, enhancing the beauty of each.
Similarly, God gave Noah a sign of His promise, never again to destroy the earth and the living creatures that dwell on it. Instead of the mucky brown that covered all of the land as Noah and his family exited the ark, they would look up and see a rainbow in the sky, all of the colors of the light spectrum refracted and beautifully existing side by side.
“I have placed my bow in the clouds, and it will be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.Whenever I form clouds over the earth and the bow appears in the clouds,I will remember my covenant between me and you and all the living creatures: water will never again become a flood to destroy every creature.” (Gen 9:13-15)
* Sing Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus(see page 15 for lyrics)
* Reflect
* Could it be that the key to mixed emotions is neither to whip them all together into a jumbled ugly mess nor isolate them and only experience them one at a time; but instead, to grow more comfortable sitting in the tension of them all existing side by side, like the rainbow?
* Pray for a desire to live in the tension of many emotions simultaneously today.
