We’re almost to the second Sunday in Advent. I was thinking about sharing a post from last year about Joy and Peace…but…instead, well, let’s just say when you open your hands and bow your head before moving the pen across the page, plans change.

Maybe it was a coincidence that I had put on the same clothes this week that I had one morning in 2017. Maybe it was a gesture of comfort as I felt a cold coming on. But they were the same clothes I’d worn the day we packed up my parents’ cabin on a small island in Northern Wisconsin.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence I opened my Bible to the same place I’d opened to that morning, sitting on the couch in the great front room overlooking the lake.

The morning of moving day I didn’t want to move a single thing. Up early, with a big pottery mug of extra hot, fresh-dripped coffee with cream, my Bible and journal, I had my pen in hand. Then, as I opened the Book, I unexpectedly happened upon Haggai’s “Call to Build the House of the Lord” and its promised glory for the new House and how places “of worship” can be a problem and the problem might not mean architectural.

Whether a Gothic cathedral with a giant bell tower or a humble white structure with a simple steeple, worship within isn’t guaranteed. Just as in my own heart, there can be enough unforgiveness within those walls to travel round and round and round for generations to come, destroying places and people, homes and churches.

The church building has no connection to belief or to one’s own behavior. God lives in hearts, the heartbeat of the Universe, the inner workings of Nature, the wings of the air, in the diving ducks and in you and me.

No building will guarantee worship in my own heart.

I remember that small island in Northern Wisconsin and how I found my peace there. After a lifetime of trying to prove myself, I found well-being there. I found God there, though he’d been trailing my heels for decades and I’d been feeling the kicking of heels of something growing inside me for quite some time.

As the Sun cracked open the black and blue sky, I began to see a new light out there beyond the water and somewhere beneath my grief.

I sat alone in the dark morning hours grieving so many losses. And that morning, like the morning this past week, was about allowing God to rebuild me.

“How is it that it’s the right time for you to live in your fine homes while the Home of God’s temple is in ruins? Take a good hard look at your life, think it over.”

Isn’t that what Advent is all about? Preparation?

“You have spent a lot of money, but you don’t have much to show for it. You keep filling your plates but you never get filled up, you keep drinking and drinking and drinking, but you’re always thirsty.” (That’s from the Message translation although in 2017 I was reading from NIV.)

And it continues…

“‘You put on layer after layer of clothes, but you can’t get warm,’ God of the Angel-Armies said. ‘Take a good hard look at your life.’”

Why?

“Because while you’ve run around, all caught up with taking care of your own houses, my House is in ruins.”

That’s why.

In Haggai’s time, the people were overwhelmed with a sense of natural disaster—their city, economy, their way of life, their church—which caused them, just as it would any of us today, to become self-protective, to focus on our own needs. So God pointed out to them, as he did me that morning, and again this past week (ugh), their great ambition.

For themselves. For myself.

Before God could rebuild anything, the house, the House, or me, he had to shine a light on the priorities, and my priorities.

In 2017, I’d published my first book. I’d launched an author website because I’d been told that was the right thing to do. I’d convinced myself it would tie into the work I was doing at the time. I wanted it all to work together. That was the plan. I wanted to reach more people with the message of dance, health and joy, of hope—of what it means to dance through the rain…because, to me, that’s what my work was about. There was so much pain in the city, dance was like dancing through the rain into the light. I thought, because for me, that’s what it was.

But instead, my new vision began to create a great divide. I felt it, but I couldn’t identify it and within three (of the hardest) years, I’d moved on. God was doing a new work in me. Reconstruction. He was tearing down the walls I had so meticulously, fastidiously, built. All those thick layers and carefully decorated walls, for…well, let’s see here, over the course of forty years?

It’s an interesting number, don’t you think? Does it remind you of anything? So what did God do with the Hebrews in Haggai’s time?

He withheld the rain.

“But he sent a more merciful rain in the form of his word. With the people’s hearts now fully attentive to God, Haggai shifted the direction of their work from selfish ambition to a selfless abandon, from a temporal focus to an eternal focus.

Why?

The word according to Haggai to me means that God rebuilds in the midst of devastation, revealing his restorative Presence.

As we abandon our old structures (the vain pursuits) we move from shaky to unshakable ground and then, oh, the places we’ll go and the people we’ll meet. Gossip gives way to grace, forgiveness to glory.

What if God is saying this, “I will take you as my personal servant and I will set you as a signet ring, the sign of my sovereign presence and authority. I’ve looked across the lake, and chosen you—you here reading this—for this work.”?

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Haggai 1 and 2