Half spent
Sunday, January 3, 2010 at 10:12PM 
It was with a great and deep sigh of relief that I squeezed into the pew on Christmas Eve. Surrounded by three generations of my own, I clutched a candle and settled in to listen to the lessons and to sing the carols and to watch for the Light coming into the night.
Concentrating on the words of the carols especially, after this prompting by Emily at Chatting At the Sky, I was struck by a phrase from an old, old hymn. As we sang the end of the first verse of Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, these words tiptoed into my ear, “…amid the cold of winter, when half spent was the night.”
I was feeling that way. Like the night was half spent.
The first part of the night was busy. It was harder than it needed to be, no doubt, despite our efforts to keep it under control. We spent our Advent weeks, trimming and trimming, both trimming in preparation for the celebrations—the tree, our home, our hearts—and also trimming in the sense of cutting back and limiting.
The culmination of this preparation was the annual trip to the airport. As we drove out of town, I felt accomplished in our well packed but not overfull bags, in our timeliness and preparedness, in our settled spirits.
But the hand patting my back in eager congratulations was my own and this is the point in most stories when the heroine meets the challenge that shows her air of achievement to be just that.
My particular challenge was a baggage checking line that stretched the length of the airport and back again. WJ and I arrived at the airport more than two hours before our scheduled departure. And we missed our flight. The four Continental employees working the kiosks could not keep up.
Standby became our word for the day and we stood and sat and walked and waited in Terminal A as flights arrived and left again without making room for us. It was ten hours and at least twice as many games of Go Fish before we called it quits and summoned Dave for a ride back home. He arrived quickly, a true knight in shining armor, with a plan to drive the sixteen hours to my parents’ home.
We grabbed his bags from our apartment and a few spare items for WJ and myself, as our suitcases had miraculously made the flight that we had missed and had arrived in the Midwest well before lunch, and the family set out together for a different kind of adventure than the one we had planned.
Half spent was the night. Half spent was the night and half spent, I felt, was all I had to offer when I squeezed into that pew on Christmas Eve. But that is the thing about Christmas. The baby is not born at the beginning of the story or at the end. The Light doesn’t enter as the heroine slips the completed Christmas cards into the mailbox just in time to pass out homemade cookies and whiz through airport security. Nor does the baby come into the picture when the trimming and the driving and the washing up of a carsick child in a roadside restroom have left everyone completely depleted. Christmastide is a midway point, coming after some waiting, some successes and failures, but well before all hope is lost.
So I breathed a sigh of relief as we all leaned against each other amid the cold on Christmas Eve. Relief that I have made it this far and relief that there is more to come. As we lit our candles and lifted them high in the dark of the nighttime church, I welcomed the Good News.
Happy New Year, by the way, and thank you for reading the first part of our story of slowing down. I hope you will be taking things slow with us as this year progresses. It is only half spent.
Family time 
Reader Comments (3)
we are but in the middle... as i say good bye to my sister, this is a good thought
oh emily, you have the soul of a poet. thank you. this has been such a hard year- a hard end to a hard year. my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and it has been absolutely harrowing. I want to thank you for those kind words to yourself because they reminded me to be kind to myself. I really look forward to reading as the year goes on. With so much love, a
Oh Emily - this is so wonderful. I just knew from the post's title you would end up at the half way point of your slow year. But, wow, the literal journey to Christmas - that was beautifully wrought out of words and heart and reality. We road tripped to the Midwest as well by car and, suffice to say, it's not a pretty experience with two kids and snow storms brewing.
Thank you for this picture of what we are all traveling toward. And the reminder that we are only half way.