An Extra Hour of Love

Dear Church,

An extra hour of love? Are you kidding me? Don’t you know how busy we are during the holidays?

This is what came to me when we began tossing around the idea of “an extra hour of love” for Advent 2022. Asking each of us to step outside of our holiday routines and add an hour a week of acts of service and expressions of kindness may seem like shoulder season work for those of us who call Jackson home.

And I also know that I, and probably you too, can get swept up by holiday routines that are a distraction to our work of preparing to focus upon the COSMIC adjustment that comes with Christmas—God come among us in human form in a humble context in order to reorient the arc and course of creation.

And so, we start smallish. We start with a kitchen timer—a cheap, digital one—waiting for you here at church, so that we might add some embodied and practical love into the world as both preparation for, and advance response to, a babe, wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger, changing the world for the lovelier.

Say we have 150 or so folks in church on a Sunday morning during the season of Advent. What if only half of us—75 or so folks—picked up this practice of giving an extra hour of love for the season. That’s 300 more hours of love. I bet we’d feel it! I know we would. Your reading for pleasure could take a hit. You might miss a warm winter nap. You could get behind on season five of Yellowstone. And our church, our community, would experience a fresh wave of Advent love, as we await the arrival of the babe Jesus.

Love,

Jimmy