Jack Hardaway
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Bed time stories.
They were a big deal in our home.
We read stories every night.
Stories as night settled, awake watching with Christ and sleeping resting in peace.
Stories as we face the darkness.
Bed time stories are more than a comfortable way to end the day, the winding down into sleep.
They are preparation for facing the night, trusting our resting and our waking to God, if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.
We read all the classic children’s stories like Good Night Moon, and Horton Hears a Who.
We quickly moved onto longer more serious stories.
Narnia, The Once and Future King, the Hobbit, and Prydain. The stories that prepared us for facing the darkness.
We would pick up the book every night and someone would say, “Now where were we”, as we turned the page.
Turning the page.
We begin a short apocalyptic season today as we begin to finish up the end of the Christian year, this week and next week, and then the first week of Advent. Three weeks of hearing visions of final things and new crew creation. Visions of God’s judgement not as dread but as hope, hope found when the world falls apart.
Don’t give up, endure, love anyway, turn the page, there is more, so much more, turn the page and encounter God.
That word Apocalypse literally means to reveal, to unveil, to disclose what was hidden, not to encounter the end of the world, but rather to encounter God and the purpose and fulfillment of creation.
It means to open the book, to turn the page, or more literally to unseal the scroll and to scroll down.
One the interesting things about our current media culture and technology is that scrolling has returned. We turn fewer and fewer pages and scroll down more and more on our computers and devices.
“Doom Scrolling” is a term I encountered over this past year.
It means to keep scrolling through more and more news reports, most of which are discouraging in some way, hoping to understand things better if we just know more.
The result has been just the opposite, rather than better understanding it has spread mass depression and psychosis.
There is now Doom Scrolling research about how bad doom scrolling is for our well being, which we can read all about as we doom scroll.
The apocalyptic season that we are beginning is the exact opposite.
It is about “Hope scrolling”, keep scrolling down, keep looking for God and the purpose of all that is.
When the world falls apart, remember to say, “Now where were we.”
Turn the page and find God.