December 8, Advent 2A (Matthew 3:1–12)
In the stitched-together story of Advent, we wrestle with each other’s certainties.
To call my maternal grandparents thrifty would be a gross understatement. Grandma washed and reused the bags in which sliced bread was sold. Grandpa was unashamed to pick through folks’ trash in an effort to find something that could be repurposed. Until they died a few years ago, their small farmhouse in central Indiana had the same worn and lumpy green carpet, accented by orange-striped wallpaper, from my mother’s childhood.
So you might imagine how surprised we all were in the late 1980s when a construction crew showed up to replace their back stoop with a grand concrete patio.
It was quite the undertaking. They dug up trees and shrubs, scraped away mounds of dirt, and raked in a dump truck full of gravel. They used forms to make a variety of textured slabs at ground level and even bigger forms to create two levels of beds for ornamental flowers.
