Day 21: Breaking

“The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” Isaiah 7:14

There are two kinds of breaking. Breaking bad and breaking good. We can binge on either one. Sometimes at the moment of the breaking, we get to decide which it will be. The flavor of breaking in Honest Advent is what the author calls “a healing breaking—to finally see what you have hoped for for so long.”

For several years there was an auditorium host who led the team when we had a Saturday night service. He had back problems so the first thing he always asked me to do before the service was walk on his back. Yep. I’d take off my shoes, he’d lay on the floor and as I walked my way up and down his spine he would moan, sigh and count. “Argh…ugh…ahhhh.” That’s 1. I’d take another step or two. “Uuugh….2, (grimace) 3, 4. Ahhhhh.” All the way up to 7. Sometimes to get #7 to crack, I’d grab the underside of the table and pull up in order to put more pressure on #7 to get it to break. Every Saturday night I would be a healing breaking for this man. And not just because it saved him a trip to the chiropractor.

There was another kind of healing breaking going on in this man’s life. A few years back he wrote this note to me. “As someone who does not believe in God, I’m sure you can’t fathom how much it means to have a place like Crossroads in my life. It is nice to have such a welcoming place, where I can come every single week, while I continue to seek and find answers. Thank you for giving me something to chew on….”

There’s a whole lot of breaking going on. What healing breaking are you longing for this Christmas? Perhaps you could be the one to “walk on another’s back” and be the catalyst for a healing breaking. Count on it. Ahhhhhhhh.

—Dennis Anderson