Anticipating

 

Anticipation (noun): excitement; waiting eagerly for something that it is known will occur; nervous expectation; being prepared.

This is the time and these are the days.

It is the same almost every year.

Somewhere between 10 days and a week before Christmas Day, I begin to realise that Christmas is soon and I begin anticipating it. And I suppose I mean ‘anticipating’ in the sense of the various aspects of the above definition. I begin to get excited (not regarding Santa and presents, but about services and dinner and family and so on). I start waiting eagerly for the various elements to occur. And while it seems sad and Scrooge-like to some, I most especially eagerly await Boxing Day which is my absolute favourite day of the year, not because it is all over – for it is not! (Christmas has only just begun! – but because it so wonderfully relaxed!). And there is undoubtedly also an element of nervous expectation; will the services be ok? Will the dinner be fine? Have I chosen the right wines? And of course there is that aspect of anticipation which is about being prepared.

And so, with that mounting sense of anticipation, this morning I looked out my Christmas jumpers and Christmas waistcoats.

I am very much at one with the Iris Johansen quote above ‘Anticipation makes pleasure more intense’. In fact, I sometimes find anticipating an event (and remembering it, for that matter) can be even more pleasurable than the event itself.

I wonder where this sense of anticipation comes from. Why do we anticipate at all? I suppose it has something to do with being prepared. But there is also something about anticipation keeping hope and expectancy alive.

And that is where I begin to wonder if my sense of anticipation which affects so many aspects of my life reaches to my anticipation of, preparation for and expectancy of the coming Day of the Lord.

I sometimes fear that in this respect at least, my sense of anticipation has been dulled and dimmed, and perhaps as a result so also are hope and expectancy.

Something to ponder, pray about and address, I reckon.