Lead Me Where

The church my family has attended for the past 17 years has met in various locations over the years. 1702 is both the longest-running location and my favorite. We quit meeting there when small boulders and sewage began to fall through the ceiling, but not before I had enjoyed many years of time spent at 1702.

When my mom had to work at church during the week, Stevy and I would accompany her with our school books. We would put our school books in the preschool Sunday School room, and spend the subsequent hours eating Panera lunch, playing an involved, multi-level game that we had created involving the crib in the nursery and plastic dishes, or watch one of the three VHS tapes the church owned.

Meeting in 1702 provided other benefits besides a freight elevator and a secret passageway that lead to the top of an attached- and private- parking garage. Because the basement that we met in was comprised mostly of cement walls and laminated cement floor, we were able to have an advent dance every year without having to worry about one false move sending the whole church up in flames.

Advent is the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and each Sunday of advent, a red candle is lit on a wreath that sits all month at the front of the sanctuary. On Christmas Eve, the purple candle representing Christ in the middle of the wreath is lit (completely unrelated to my birthday candles, also lit on December 24th) as we commemorate Jesus’ birth.

But we didn’t just whip out the matches and light the things. We did the advent dance. The advent dance is done while a woman in the worship teams sings “Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel” in eery, worshipful tones, and consists of a simple, wonderful, beautiful series of motions which are done while each dancer grips two candles in their hands, the culmination of the dance being one, two, three, or four of the dancers lighting their respective advent-wreath candles.

I was probably about nine years old the first time I danced in the advent dance, and I was in eighth grade when I did my last dance. For those years, every Saturday morning starting a week before Thanksgiving I would skip happily to 1702 to go over the dance with the other girls involved. These lessons became increasingly superfluous with every year, as we all got older and better at dancing artistically with 10-inch fire sticks in our hands, but we all still went.

With every verse of the song, the dance becomes more intricate and another pair of girls joins in. As a little girl, I was often in the first verse. I swished down the aisle wearing all black, gripping white candles in sweaty palms and being careful to keep step with the girl across the aisle doing the same. As I got older, I began appearing in later verses, but almost every year I had the privilege of holding my white candle to the red that sat resolutely on the advent wreath, watching the flame jump from my candle to Jesus’.

I loved that dance.

~Natalie