Thursday, December 18, 2014

Singspirations and Sentimentality


                One of my favorite childhood Christmas traditions was our annual trek to small town Edgerton, Minnesota.

                I suppose every church or denomination of churches has instances of its own customs or quirky lingo.  In the PRC, one of those customs is the recurring, celebratory, inter-church sing-alongs that we call “singspirations.”  I can still hear some of my high school friends say, “You’re going to a what?  A sing-sper-what?”

                Among the PR churches in the Midwest, singspirations are organized by the young people of each congregation, and each congregation has its own holiday singspiration to host.  The Christmas singspiration has been held in the little white clapboard church building in Edgerton for as long as I can remember.  And nothing short of all-out blizzard kept my parents from making the hour-long trip north.

                When I was growing up, my parents drove a full-size, rust-colored 1972 Chevy van.  The van seated twelve, though there were functioning seatbelts for maybe five or six.  The bench seats were mismatched, and cream-colored curtains hung in the windows.  The carpet was green shag, and the gas cap had been procured from a VW somewhere along the way.  If you sat on the second bench seat, all the way in, you had a footrest: the box heater that was capable of scorching the legs of those directly next to it and in front of it while the rest of the van remained just above freezing.

                When we drove to the singspiration on those December Sunday evenings, we’d be dressed in our church clothes.  Christmas dresses, if we had them, tights, and bulky coats with enormous fur-lined hoods.  We’d fight over the warm seats as we piled in and snuggled under the afghans that Mom stowed in the van every winter.  I can remember bucking snowdrifts already on our own gravel road, Dad muttering about the wisdom in going at all, yet still we went.  And all the way we’d read with flashlights, look out the frosty windows at the stars, point out the places whose farmers had braved the cold to string Christmas lights, and sing carols. 

                When we got to the little white church in Edgerton, we’d pile out of the van and clatter our way downstairs to use the toilet before clacking our way back upstairs and filing into one of the wooden bench seats.  The singspiration itself was always a joy, the pews packed, the Christmas carols, hymns and psalms accompanied by the lusty pipe organ.  Afterwards we’d click our way back downstairs for cookies before braving the wintry night once more for the drowsy drive home.

                This year, if the Lord wills, I might make it to Edgerton this coming Sunday evening for the singspiration again.  If we make it, my husband and I will transport our own flashlight-reading, carol-singing crew in our own Chevy van, with its able heater.  Maybe.  We have miles to go and children that may need sleep before that will happen.  But maybe.

                Christmas is a season that lends itself to sentimentality, isn’t it?  And some of my musing about the Christmas singspiration is sentimental.  Some of it, though, is my own way of recalling the years of the Most High, of communing with my own heart and exclaiming, “Lord, how good you are!  How kind, and how faithful you have been to me in my life!  Indeed, all of your promises in Jesus Christ are Yes! and Amen!”


The Christian faith is not backward-reaching: it’s future-seeking.  It’s a faith that doesn’t dwell in the past but presses forward to our glorious expected end.  It’s my prayer that as you look backward this Christmas season to the birth of our Savior, you’ll do so longing for his second Advent, that great, final coming when he will make all things new.  Blessed Christmas to you, friends.

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