<a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/nativity.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-185" title="nativity" src="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/nativity.jpg" alt="" width="459" height="352" /></a>
<h5>This is the nativity scene my parents have had for as long as I can remember. When I was in
high school, my puppy got a hold of baby Jesus and gave him a good chew.</h5>
I'm going to tell you an Advent story. Not the one about my dog chewing up the baby Jesus from my parents' Very Special nativity scene (although I will touch on that later). The Advent story I want to start with is one I heard for the first time yesterday, in church. It begins in the 1960s, with two friends and some LSD.

The point of this story will become clear, but just in case you're not interested in Advent or LSD, and you're thinking of leaving, here's why I'm writing this post: The classic stories and symbols of the season often come across as worn out, diluted or just plain empty, leaving us to wander us through December without anything but our shopping lists to anchor or guide us. I'm hoping this story will offer a different way of thinking about Advent.

The story is actually Judy's. She goes to church with me, and was "interviewed" yesterday by Jim, one of our pastors, as part of his teaching on what he was calling "signposts of hope."

Judy began her story by telling us about a friend she used to do LSD with. One day when they were tripping, her friend hallucinated and Jesus appeared to him, telling him to stop doing LSD. To Judy, who was not at all religious and was in fact raised Jewish, the idea of <em>Jesus</em> appearing to her friend, telling him to change his life, was as crazy as any idea she could imagine.

Her friend, though, did change his life. Then he urged Judy to read the Bible, which she did—cover to cover. By the time she finished, she said, her life had changed. Everything she had somehow always known, deep inside, suddenly made sense and took shape, both in the Bible and in her life.

And everyone lived happily ever after. The End.
<h3>Real Advent stories involve some tears</h3>
Actually, that's not quite how real Advent stories go. We might sing about little babies born in stables that somehow never cry, but I'm pretty sure Jesus did lots of crying, just like we all do. This world can be a really harsh place.

Judy encountered more than her share of harsh realities. Her younger sister, whom she was very close to, was diagnosed with cancer and died a rapid, horrific death. A year later, on the anniversary of her sister's death, a close friend died.

To begin recovering from her losses, Judy traveled to Hawaii. She was a very strong swimmer, but one day while swimming in the ocean, a riptide carried her too far from shore. As she realized she was going to drown, she said it occurred to her that perhaps she had a subconscious desire to die.

Suddenly, though, a small prayer rose up in her: "God, help me." Although she hadn't seen another person for well over an hour, no sooner had the prayer been thought, and a man was bobbing along next to her in the ocean, asking if she needed help. He was an Australian Olympic swimmer in training, swimming between the Hawaiian islands. He put Judy on his back and swam her to shore.

It's an amazing story, but this isn't the Happily Ever After part, either. Sorry.

Judy went through many ups and downs over the next several years, eventually drifting away from God and her Christian community. One day, when she was in the midst of caring for her dying mother and worrying about a lump she had recently discovered in her own breast (which did, in fact, turn out to be an aggressive cancer), there was Pastor Jim, passing her on the sidewalk. They hadn't seen each other for 18 years.
<h3>Hope in the darkness</h3>
There is much more to Judy's story, of course. Each day she lives, the story is extended. So why is it an Advent story? Judy said it best, yesterday: "There's lots of darkness. The amazing thing is when you're in that darkness, God reaches in and pulls you out, back to the light."

And Jim tied it all together this way: "Our hope isn't in the fact that we'll finally get it right. It's that God goes before us, and he's putting up signposts of hope along the way."

We were asked to think about what our own personal signposts of hope have been. One of the things I love about my church is that it recognizes all types of signposts, whatever form they take. It recognizes that we're all in different places, and need to be spoken to in different ways at different times. Sometimes we're tuned into the subtleties of our hearts, or something we read; other times we need to almost die, or we need our very worst vice to be the deliverer of hope and good news.

The point is that Advent and Christmas aren't exclusively tied to a certain collection of stories and symbols that automatically trigger hope for everyone—a nativity scene, a star, a ring of candles, or a calendar counting down the days.

Advent is ultimately about having hope that with God's guidance, we'll emerge from the darkness, back into the light. The symbols of that hope are powerful, and absolutely unique to each of us. We only need to identify them, and allow them to remind us.

One of my symbols of hope is my house, which I believe God led me to during one of the darkest times in my life. (I wrote about it here, <a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/?p=26">A turning point with a street address</a>.)

And sometimes the classic symbols work, as well. They just might require some tweaking. For me, another symbol of hope <em>is</em> Jesus in the manger—in particular, the one I grew up with, marred by an unruly puppy's sharp teeth, and somehow representing even more hope, because of it.

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