A New Year with the Clemmons, on Mission
Reflection Convection, 2022 in Review, Winter of our Discontent?
Dear friends & family,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
And Happy New Year! (This benediction applies retroactively to the Christian year, which began in Advent, and the public new year, which begins today.) For me, the changing year quickens reflection, which usually invites melancholy, which sometimes sours into a dull sadness and sometimes sweetens into gratitude and fresh resolve. As I write, on New Year’s Eve Day, it remains to be seen how this year’s transition turns out. I’m like a baking contestant, nervously pacing as I wait for the oven to do its unforgiving work.
My reflecting usually goes sour when it fixates on the self—my failures, my disappointments, my inadequacies, my sins, my occasional victory or . It usually turns out better when I reflect rather on what’s beyond my self—the manifold blessings I received anew 24/7/365, and the God who, for reasons which exceed my understanding, has not stopped giving them. A smart practice, then, to deflect from self at such times and turn one’s attention in the direction eyes were designed to go: outward.
Officially, we’re past Advent now, and into the ongoing feast of Christmas. But Advent never really goes away. Not this side of the second coming, anyway. Because the season of Advent is thick with themes. Hope, Faith, Joy, and Peace. Judgment, Hell, Heaven, the Last Things. Mary’s yes, Herod’s no, the disciples’ uncertain wavering. The Messiah who was to come, and has come, and will come again. It’s hard to narrow down, and I don’t think we’re supposed to. Advent is like all of life, which always comes to us in a superabundance we cannot contain and can hardly glean.
Jesus tells a parable of ten virgins who are waiting overnight for the bridegroom’s arrival. Five fail to prepare, and their oil runs low and then their flames snuff out.
Five have filled their lamps fresh, and they’ve trimmed the wicks, and at midnight when the cry finally comes—“The Bridegroom is here! Come out to meet him!”—they rise to meet him with a shout.
And so as the new year turns over, I’d invite you to fight off our foolish tendency to respond to the night closing in around us by closing in on ourselves. Life this side of heaven is not for the faint-hearted—we suffer, we wait, we suffer, we wait, we suffer, we wait. But we are not left without provision for the wait. We’re granted little arrivals, and big ones, to sustain us. We’re granted the privilege to long for the recreation of all things. God has promised, and his Word does not return void.
We need not waste our time in fear—fear that we’ll found unprepared—but rather we endeavor to fill up our oil stores. To confess our sins and ask the forgiveness we cannot earn. To give thanks for the great benefits we have received at God’s hands. To hear his holy Word. To ask for those things requisite to our life and our salvation. To paraphrase the tagline of Alan Jacobs’ blog, we endeavor not to curse the darkness, but to light more lamps.
Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!
Zack
2022 in Review
In 2020 I used a new year’s newsletter to list twenty things for which we were thankful in a tumultuous year. Likewise, here are 22 for ‘22.
A God who does not abandon our souls to the grave.
For three (relatively) healthy and exuberant and inquisitive and adventurous children
That we reached our income needs for 2022 (esp. so that we could qualify for health insurance assistance)
The saints of Christ the King Anglican Church—their eagerness to worship God, study the Word, give with genuine generosity
Small but persistent confirmations that I am pursuing a genuine call to ordination in Christ’s church
That Virgil’s begun to talk, and how much he adds to our family conversations
The rocky Maine coastline
Dan and Carrie Wolf of Rise Anglican in Portland, Maine
A successful launch of Seasonal Art Galleries at church
Stan Gavitt, host and friend
Mushroom hunts in the woods
An unexpected tutoring gig, and the even less expected Taco Tuesdays it funded
A stuttering but working furnace through the unusual Alabama cold
That there is just one. more. semester. to go.
A Facebook-Marketplace-acquired smoker, and for meats to smoke
The overturning of Roe v. Wade
One perfect big-wave beach-day this summer
An upcoming gallery show for Erin, alongside her mom, in March at the Carnegie Arts Center in Decatur, AL
That our giant oak, which began to split this summer, came down without inflicting massive damage
Eleanor’s delightful, friend-full birthday party
For you, who keep us in your mind and your prayers, who have continued to support us financially, whose friendship and love and ongoing sanctification means far more than my woeful communication skills reflect
Winter of our Discontent?
This is overstating it dramatically—we are in fact rather close to content. But it would appear that since the beginning of our Alabama sojourn, the Advent and Christmas season are reliably times of illness, opposition, accident, and exhaustion. Perhaps we are simply Seasonally Affected.
Much like last winter, I’ve encountered some unidentifiable and persistent illness which serves more to unsettle and throttle my work than to cause direct pain or incapacitation. I came down with a fever while preaching in Memphis in mid-November, and I’ve been uneasy in my own body ever since. Worse, though, is that the whole family has been down for the past week or so with a medley of cough, congestion, lowgrade fever, exhaustion, and more. Whenever we have a real break from school/work, our bodies decide we now have the elbow room to get sick.
Over Thanksgiving, which was otherwise a pleasant time with family, we discovered that Ames responds to ant bites in a manner accurately characterized as Severely Allergic. An anodyne autumnal walk turned into Zack running Ames a half-mile back to the house while begging God not to let Ames’ throat close as his skin swelled and hived and he started to cough and “feel funny.” We were able to get a partial dose of Benadryl in his system, spent the afternoon fruitlessly searching for an Urgent Care open on Thanksgiving Day, and spent Thanksgiving evening in the ER. In the end, Ames’ reaction calmed, and we’re now epi-armed against any devastating reactions to come.
Still, that’s overselling the bad, and there’s been much good these past two months, namely:
Celebrating Ames, who is now 4 years old!
Near the beginning of Advent we hosted our second seasonal Arts Gallery & Event at Christ the King. This one was entitled, “Behold, The Bridegroom Cometh! Anticipation, Arrivals, and All That We Await.” With the help of lots of good friends, we were able to put together a gallery, a journal, and a lovely program of poetry, original music, and story. (If you’d like, you can read the poem I wrote for the journal here.)
Erin and I got to join in a glassblowing workshop and make our own ornament as part of the CTK staff Christmas party
We took a post-semester trip to South Carolina to celebrate my mom’s doctoral graduation, and Christmas with the family
A genuine date night out for Erin and I in Charleston
World Cup drama
A short trip to Decatur to celebrate Christmas with Erin’s family
Delightful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day liturgies, along with cozy family time
A whirlwind New Year’s trip to reunite with lots of college friends
WinterScenes
Photos from Charleston, SC and Birmingham, AL, November-December 2022.
Status Board
Reading: An early Christmas present to myself, I ordered Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Passenger, and found the experience of reading it to be like settling again into warm flannel sheet on an icy Knoxville night, expect the bed is on fire and also you’re not actually in Knoxville, you’re in hell.
Listening: For our Advent gallery, I compiled an Advent playlist which I think turned out quite well, and transitions quite seamlessly into Christmastide.
Viewing: Here’s my Top Ten Films Seen in 2022 (only a few of which, I think, were released this year. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re usually at least a year behind the release calendar, depending as we do on the library’s acquisitions team if we’re going to watch anything recent)
1. Drive My Car (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
2. The Scent of Green Papaya (dir. Tran Anh Hung, 1993)
3. After Yang (dir. Kogonada, 2021)
4. RRR (dir. S. S. Rajamouli, 2022)
5. Top Gun: Maverick (dir. Jospeh Kosinski, 2022)
6. Voyage of Time (dir. Terrence Malick, 2016)
7. Behemoth (dir. Zhao Liang, 2015)
8. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (dir. Tom Gormican, 2022)
9. Some Kind of Heaven (dir. Lance Oppenheim, 2020)
10. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (dir. Andrew Dominik, 2007)
Food & Drink: Erin and I’s Charleston date night took us to a restaurant called Tempest, where we enjoyed tuna tataki, ocean rolls, and crab cakes. The rose, the brandy, and the check delivered in an old paperback of Shakespeare’s play were all corny touches, but much appreciated. Mostly, though, I’m enjoying experimenting with a new (used) smoker I picked up off Facebook for cheap. So far we’ve enjoyed a whole smoked turkey, smoked prime rib, and smoked lamb leg.
Prayer Requests
The best way to support us is to join with the Son in remembering us before the Father. If you’d like to pray with and for us, here are some things you can remember:
that God would go before us this final semester to prepare what comes after seminary
that Erin would have a fruitful season of creation
for Zack as he enters a busy semester of coursework, begins to teach a 12-week Sunday School class, and prepares to preach this upcoming Sunday
that Eleanor, Ames, and Virgil would all quickly adjust to the rhythms of a new semester
that our children would delight in the Lord’s world, and would come to know and love him ever more deeply
in your charity, please continue to pray for the son of a friend and mentor of mine, whose treatment for an aggressive brain cancer continues
We’d also like to pray with and for you! If you’re reading this, you’re probably already in our prayers, but we’d love to know more specifically what we can pray for. You can text us, of course, or you can email us prayer requests at clemmonsonmission@gmail.com
We’re the Clemmons family–-Zack, Erin, Eleanor, Ames & Virgil–-living & studying & working in Birmingham, Alabama for sake of God’s Kingdom.
If you’d like, you can support us financially by ordering a Clemmons Studio subscription, as we navigate this season on mission, with part-time income.
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