I realized I hadn’t written anything for the fourth Sunday of Advent and since it’s the fourth day of Christmas, here’s a meditation on wings, solitude, and the love of enough—exploring faith, freedom, and the quiet assurance that God makes space for us to belong.

It’s the fourth day of Christmas and I’m thinking about wings (also that I jumped right into Christmas without any acknowledgement of the fourth Sunday of Advent: the Flame of Love.)

It wasn’t until this morning, as I walked Fannie in a drizzle, that I realized the first four days of Christmas are about wings—birds, hens, doves, and a partridge. (What is a partridge…?)

What if the wings of a soul have learned to beat in the upper air, but a mind still clings to the earth…?

One morning over Christmas, I read the words, “Dare to be Alone” in Streams in the Desert. I perked right up because it seems more and more over the years, I’m content being alone…that is, as long as there’s a well-proportioned mix of time holding my new grandson with my son at my side.

“Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me,” Jesus says in John 16:33.

What if a soul no longer needs the constant help it once required, or the attention it once craved, or the constant prayer and faith of others to hold it steady?

Is this emergence? The time when wings, once wet and weighed down, have dried as the pages of my Bible and the book on Ezekiel have after they soaked up the rain like a sponge on our drive to Winchester over the Holidays?

What if the assistance you once received had a place in your soul’s development, but the time has arrived when it acts as a direct hindrance to its faith and peace?

Could this be the struggle of leaving one’s cocoon, of no longer needing the security of approval you once depended on?

For someone mutually-dependent this is a big change. 

What if your wings have learned to beat the higher air? Grace has lifted you, held you up, so that, (I love those two words) you can be who you’re supposed to be (the wife, mother, grandmother…writer or) whoever it is that you were created to be?

Are you ready for this new freedom in this “splendid isolation” Jesus has with the Father? 

What if in taking every moment as we experience it, as if it were planned for us— both heights and depths—saying, “Have your way with me, Lord.” And we are assured that His response will be to make the way as easy for us as the journey can be? 

What if the detailed, almost overwhelming measurements of the restored temple—numbers, cubits, boundaries in Ezekiel Chapters 44-48—are not about control but about assurance:

There is space prepared for us.

We belong.

There is order beneath the rubble—between the lines and spaces.

Am I enough? He asks. 

Yes, Lord. 

Am I enough? He asks again, knowing there’s a “but” in there somewhere. (Oh, He knows where.)

Yes, Lord, but…

Am I enough?

Yes, Lord. You are enough for me.

And when I finally accept this—when I dare to be alone—He shows me, just as I am, that I am enough, too. 

A partridge is a medium-sized galliform bird in any of several genera, with a wide native distribution throughout parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Wikipedia.

Photos thanks to photographers: Arie Oldman, Featured French Hens; Andy Kennedy, Partridge; Arand Ramavath, Turtle Doves; Sergey Kopp, Calling Birds—Unsplash