ADVENT, THE WEIGHT: I haven’t felt very “Christmasy” this year. Perhaps I’ve lost the wonder or perhaps I’ve wandered with the weight of daily routine or maybe it’s just that 2025 has added weight by stripping the word normal from my vocabulary.
       Weight like the baggage of a parent with dementia. The weight of the same repeating questions. The weight of the worst, “when am I going home?”.
     The weight of pennies that I laid on my dad’s marker in section GG at National Cemetery over the weekend. A weight I felt last Thursday when I stood at center court & had to look into questioning, doubting faces that I had done my job right when an opposing team didn’t show but thankfully two referees did. A weight that would have been lighter if I could’ve talked to my dad, gotten his answers for others questions.  And there are the pennies laid on my in-laws stones across the way in National’s section JJ. This time of year, those copper coins are heavy too.
       Today, I watched two brothers carry the weight of words on a sheet of paper to say goodbye to their father. Advent is heavy & as I’ve sought the season’s joy & hope, my mind has wandered, repeatedly wondering about a guy who carried some weight. A guy named Joseph.
      For 9 months, even with assurances from an angel, he likely had to deal with pointed fingers, likely Southern Baptists version 1.0. I’m sure there were whispers too. Whispers from folks who were sure ol’ Joe & Mary were using “virgin conception” as cover for a bossa nova between the covers.
       On top of that, more weight. His 20 something self had to load the family donkey for a rocky 90 mile journey to Bethlehem with a teenage girl. A girl due any minute with God’s child though not old enough for a learner’s permit to drive the donkey.
       All the fuss, all the weight of blue collar carpenter & expectant father, to pay his taxes because online extensions hadn’t yet been invented. Exhausting travel only to find every hotel that offered free continental breakfast was booked. A cave would have to do. A cave that either was offered by the innkeeper with total compassion or total greed.
    Not settled long, the baby arrived. He was swaddled in a feeding trough used by the other occupants of the cave & then, as Joseph might have been holding not his, but His infant & world hope, visitors showed up. At this point, the weight of questions, both his & others must have been substantial. Joseph had to be questioning everything, everyone.
       He was told the Son of God was arriving & the first folks that show up to look were the lowest of the lowly shepherds. The ones working the overnight shift, the kind that get off at 7AM & pop a cold PBR on the way to the local waffle joint. The kind that smell of wet wool & sheep urine, offering the aroma of bare or shoddily sandaled feet mixed with fields by night.
        Later, sages on camelback with treasures stopped in to balance the haves & have nots in the guest book. Maybe Joseph grasped the magnitude, the weight of the day or like some of us or maybe just me, he was caught up in a past of pointed fingers at center court or worried about tomorrow’s questions. Or worried about right now & “please God, let me & Mary get some rest” was blurted from under the weight.
      Just maybe he found on the first Christmas what I found with more meaning a week before my 63rd one. Before I deposited coins at a cemetery, I sat with an old friend in church, a friend who could easily have broken under the weight of his past. He didn’t break because of the baby Joseph laid in a feeding trough, a manger. There is no record of the length or the weight of the baby whose birth we celebrate in 3 days.
       The reality, is the weight of the baby is enough to bear the weight of the World. That whether under weight in a cave, in a meadow full of sheep, atop a camel, or in a parked car as afternoon sun bakes the roof in a memory care facility parking lot as the mind beats the air of “why, God?” or the weight of pennies or words on paper or freed by the released weight of the past indicated by an extended arm of praise in a church, Advent, Christmas, is worth the weight…