by Christie Purifoy | Dec 5, 2012 | Advent, Family, motherhood, Uncategorized, Waiting

We gathered around our advent wreath Sunday night.
The boys were too loud, and the baby needed to be fed halfway through, the three-year-old whined because we wouldn’t light all four candles, and then, of course, everyone fought over who would get to blow the candle out. But, the dining-room lights were low, and it was sort of beautiful, too.
We avoided wordy explanation and long prayers and passed out bread and grape juice instead (gluten-free for the big boy). My bread was a little stale, but, like I said, the lights were low, and it was all sort of beautiful.
If Advent is supposed to be a kind of journey, I wonder where we’ll be in a few more weeks. Will anything be different? Will I be any different?
It’s hard to imagine because my hormones are in new-baby upheaval and the boys I love so much are much too loud so I’m always yelling when I mean to be loving and the only change I can imagine is this:
We will sit together by the light of four candles instead of one.
The room we share will be just a little brighter.
My family may look its best in low light, but I still think this is what I want – this is the change I most desire.
A little more light to see by.
And the grace to love what it reveals.
What does Advent look like to you? Click here for the Advent flickr group hosted by our own photographer, Kelli Campbell.
Want to keep up with each post this Advent? Find There is a River on facebook here. You can subscribe or sign up to receive each post by email here.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 27, 2012 | Advent, Blog, Jesus, motherhood, Seasons, Uncategorized, Waiting

As I write this, we are waiting for snow. I can hear rain on the metal roof of the red barn, but I am straining my ears for quiet. When the rain turns to snow (as the forecast promises it will), quietness will spread the news.
Silence heralds the advent of snow.
There were so many silent years between the words of Malachi and those of Matthew. I imagine the silence building until those who strained their ears, like Simeon and Anna in the temple, could hear the silence speak: He is coming. Hold on. He is coming.
I want to be like Anna.
I want to pray him in with my waiting.
My own season of intense waiting may have ended (with an old Pennsylvania farmhouse and a new baby girl), but I need Jesus more than ever.
I need his presence because, apart from him, this home is just a pile of old bricks crushing us with endless to-dos. Apart from him, there is no hope for me as a mother (the best and hardest thing my firstborn taught me, and it’s a lesson I learn again with each child, is I do not have what it takes).
I desperately need him for today (to give meaning to my dishwashing and the endless picking up of toys), and I need him for tomorrow (because, apart from him, my life has no destination; what am I walking toward?).
And so, this month, I will pause in the midst of online shopping and tree decorating. I will put down the toy catalog and the cookie cutter (which, let’s be honest, will be a relief. I could write a book on the horrors of holiday baking for the child allergic to butter, wheat, and nuts).
I will turn my face towards darkness and watch for light.
I will listen to silence.
I will pray him in with my waiting.
“… come quickly to me, O God. You are my help and my deliverer; Lord, do not delay.”
(Psalm 70:5)
You can read the introduction to last year’s Advent series here.
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by Christie Purifoy | Nov 26, 2012 | Advent, Family, God's Love, Grateful, motherhood, Pennsylvania, Poetry, Pregnancy, Uncategorized, Waiting

One year ago, I was waiting, holding on to these words from Psalm 81: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth, and I will fill it.”
The date inked in beside those words in my Bible is August 23, 2011. By the time Advent began, I’d spent three months wringing out every drop of hope they had to give.
I did not know when (or even if) we would be moving on from Florida, but I longed to leave the desert behind. I was not yet pregnant, but I had a daughter who prayed every night for a sister. I had only imprecise dreams of what the future might hold, but I kept my mouth open and imagined a cup running over.
I wrote every day that Advent, and I shared it all with you here.
Before I’d even packed away the Christmas tree, I was pregnant, and the events which would bring us to Pennsylvania had been set in motion. I celebrated the new year with anticipation, though I still knew nothing of a baby girl or a red brick farmhouse.
Such a year it has been. Such a year.
And now – now, it is a season for singing. And, so, like last year, I will have something for you here each day of Advent.
We will wait and sing, together.
Magnificat
I am singing my Advent anthem to you, God: How all year
I’ve felt your thrusts, every sound and sight stabbing
like a little blade – the creak of gulls, the racket
as waves jostle pebbles, the road after rain, shining
like a river, the scrub of wind on the cheek, a flute
trilling – clean as a knife, the immeasurable chants of green,
of sky: messages, announcements. But of what? Who?
Then last Tuesday, a peacock feather (surprise!)
spoke from the grass; Flannery calls hers “a genuine
word of the Lord.” And I – as startled as Mary, nearly,
at your arrival in her chamber (the invisible
suddenly seen, urgent, iridescent, having put on light
for her regard) – I brim over like her, quickening. I can’t
stop singing, thoroughly pregnant with Word!
– Luci Shaw

by Christie Purifoy | Sep 5, 2012 | Family, motherhood, Pregnancy, Stories, Uncategorized, Waiting, Writing

Most evenings, after dinner, you’ll find us piling into the car. We drive because it’s so beautiful here, we drive to put the three-year-old to sleep, we drive because we’re worn out and we want to fill the time between feeding and bathing in the easiest way.
I’ve never been very adept at keeping my mind tucked inside my body. It’s always floating off, connecting imagined dots somewhere up in the clouds, which makes me (I’m well aware) a real danger on the road. With Jonathan behind the wheel, I’m free to tell stories in my head, so I do. So many stories.
They’re meant for you; I’m sure of it. Someday (soon, I hope) I’ll share them. But for now … well, I’ve entered a kind of nine-months-pregnant tunnel.
It’s a strange, foggy place. Most of the things I normally value in life seem lost in the general grayness. Like writing for this blog or returning phone calls. Other seemingly unimportant things loom inexplicably large. Like painting my bedroom furniture.
Yes, the baby’s room is a mess of odds and ends, and the bassinet I recently ordered through the mail is still sitting in its unopened box exactly where the UPS man left it last week. But I can’t tell you how vitally, vitally important it has been to attack my bed with white paint.
Please, baby girl, just hold on till the paint dries.
I’m not sure if I’ll be in this space much before she arrives. I do promise I’ll be back before long.
There is so much here (in this new place and season) worth noticing, and I don’t think these things are meant only for me. Things like a full moon rising over a quilt-square patch of corn. Things like driving the same country road night after night until the night when one wrong (right?) turn takes you through a field of sunflowers.
Those things must mean something. They must be a part of some very good story.
I’ll be sure to let you know what I discover. Once the fog recedes.
by Christie Purifoy | May 31, 2012 | Faith, God's promises, Music, Poetry, prayer, Pregnancy, Uncategorized, Waiting
Pentecost Sunday was nearly a week ago, but I still feel stuck in that room. Waiting. Asking this question: how did they survive the long, empty days between Jesus leaving and the Comforter coming?
How did they endure being lifted up by the joy of a promise believed only to drop again into the discouragement of yet another not yet?
And why the gap? Why did they have to wait at all?
We do know that the wait moved them to gather together. I imagine the promise was easier to believe when they could see the hope in one another’s faces. When they could pass around their Jesus stories, like a platter of bread and fish. Stories multiplied into hope. And faith.
And I imagine they worshipped. Sang and prayed.
Was this what it was all for? Was their worship the reason?
Did God wait, strain with holding himself back, because he wanted to hear their songs?
“Call to me,” he had once told them. “And I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3).
Call. My husband tells me this word suggests something organized, something formal. Something created. Like a song. Like a poem. Something more than careless words tossed at the sky.
Maybe you don’t sing songs. Maybe you don’t write poems. But maybe you journal. Maybe you sketch. Maybe you take photographs or bake bread for the neighbors. Maybe you orchestrate elaborate finger-painted messes with the three-year-olds at church and maybe, just maybe, that is your call? Your song? Your cry for more of God?
And maybe that is the point of it all. The point of waiting. The point of living. To add our call to the many others until a crescendo of sound and beauty and worship rises to heaven and All is unleashed.
Then, just as it was that Pentecost when God’s church was born, wind and fire reveal the great unknowns.
What have we all been waiting for? To hear the mysteries of God’s glory in a language we can comprehend.
Those unsearchable glories we never even knew to seek.

by Christie Purifoy | Apr 30, 2012 | God's Love, Home, prayer, Seasons, Uncategorized, Waiting

I have a picture in my mind, and I can’t seem to let it go. Maybe the picture has me and won’t let go. I honestly can’t tell which way it is.
I see God’s children in Egypt in the moment before he rescues them. I see them just on the verge of being carried away toward their true home.
They are standing, as God asked, with their cloaks tucked up into their belts, sandals on their feet, walking sticks held in their hands. They are ready. They are waiting.
They are also eating. Eating in haste, yes, but still eating. Roasted lamb can only be consumed so quickly, after all.
How excited they must have been. How afraid. Where did they get the strength to stand still, to chew and swallow, to wait quietly but in full expectation?
I want to know because I feel myself among them.
We are continuously arriving at new thresholds. What is on the other side? Sometimes we see quite clearly. A child’s birth. A new job. A move. Sometimes we see less clearly. We are filled with expectation, but … for what, exactly? We’re not sure.
And I’m wondering, given all the uncertainty, how to find the balance between readiness (bags packed, sandals on feet) and stillness (I will cook, I will chew, I will swallow).
We are asking certain questions in our house. Where will we be living this time next year? Where will our baby be born? In Florida? Somewhere new? How long will God ask us to live this in-between life?
I sat down in church this weekend, and the questions made so much noise in my head that I shut my eyes. I wanted to give them my whole attention. I wanted to listen to my questions more than I wanted to listen to Scripture. Or prayer. Or a song. So, I didn’t see the words of the next worship song flash onto the screen. I heard them.
There’s no place I’d rather be than here in your love
That startled me. In my mind, I heard new, much more insistent questions: can I sing these words? Are they true?
I don’t know if they are true for me. That, however, may not be the best question to ask.
Here is the question I am asking: how do I make these words true?
I sang those words. I’m still singing them.
They may not be a statement of fact, but I think that they are something better.
They are a prayer.