First a couple announcements:
- The first Tuesday of each month at 6:30pm, I will be leading a short Vespers devotion and prayer service via Zoom. Nothing fancy, nothing formal; come as you are and where you are to be in fellowship and share concerns and thoughts and burdens that are weighing on you. The next Vespers is next Tuesday, December 7th.
- Saturday, December 11th is the Young Adult Group Christmas Game Night! Young adults are welcome to join us at the church at 2pm for a time of service, fellowship with games, pizza (because who doesn't love pizza), and a White Elephant gift exchange ($10-$15 limit).
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Hello Broadway!
I've kept to the Scandinavian languages this week, though it's Swedish rather than Icelandic; not so close to Old Norse, but still a fun, interesting language in its own right. Swedish was one of the first languages I studied in-depth, when I was first discovering my love of languages back in high school, right after Finnish, and as you can see, my fascination with the languages of that part of the world hasn't really faded with time, even as I've also spent a great deal of time studying languages of various other parts of the world.
Tidsoptimist is kind of a funny word, which many of you will probably be able to guess at (at least part of) the meaning of; it literally translates to 'time optimist' and refers to someone who is constantly late because they're just absolutely and always convinced they have more time to do something or get somewhere than they actually do. It's that one family member that's always showing up to the reunion late, or that person who's like 'oh I can leave five minutes later and finish this, traffic can't possibly be that bad right?'
Sometimes, as with most things, it's not such a bad thing; after all, even if it means you'll be late to something else, sometimes it's worth taking your time to finish what you're doing, and rushing about isn't always the best idea. On the other hand though, it can mean that you end up leaving things undone because you start them when you shouldn't, and assume you'll be able to finish things you've promised to do, even if you actually don't have the time to do it.
I think perhaps we've all been there; we've all taken on things when we shouldn't, been too much of an optimist about how much free time we'll have for this project or that, or how well we'll be able to balance multiple commitments.
And we've all, also, passed up opportunities to help others, to do good, because 'we'll have time later'. But that's the thing, isn't it? We can't know we'll have the time, the opportunity, later. But we can and frequently do know that we have the opportunity to help in a given moment. Right then. We can...give a coworker a ride home, we can stay a little late after an event to help clean up, we can talk to someone about an insensitive comment they made, educate people and raise awareness of things that they may not know about, social injustices they may be inadvertently perpetuating.
Because while we can be a time optimist with regards to...getting to a party on time, even getting to work on time or some kind of meeting or whatever else of the dozens of things we go about doing in our daily lives, there's no room for that when it comes to helping others. There's no room for that when it comes to serving and spreading the love of God. The time is always now; we cannot act as though we have more, we cannot be optimistic that we'll have chances later, because God is at hand now, forever and always, and in this season of Advent that because even more evident.
