Noonday Notes

Issue No. 26

December 5th, 2025

This week has been full of contrasts. Cold, gray days with the occasional clear sky and bright sun. Harvesting in the cold took me back to my years farming in New York. Snow in October, frozen fingers, wet, dreary and a sun that seemed to abandon us for months. Long, heavy days when everything felt frozen and quiet.

And of course, the weather for me is never just the weather, it’s something deeper. The awareness of the world as it is: dark and longing for something more. Pastor Brit nailed it on Sunday when he said “...our true problem is this, that we live in a dark and broken world that diets and organization and more money and a new vehicle cannot fix.”

I’ve always felt an ache. I wake up sad more often than happy. I often feel a low-grade despair about the brokenness around us. Becoming a Christian didn’t take that away, it just finally gave it a name. Advent puts language to the ache. We are waiting. We are longing. We know that things are not yet as they should be.

But as the days shorten we lean toward the promise that light is coming. There is darkness and hope, ache and anticipation. Advent invites us to hold them all. And in that holding, we remember that we’re not alone in the waiting. There is light breaking in, even if it’s dim at first, even if we don’t recognize where it’s truly coming from.

We head to John for this one, “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” (John 1:9-10 NIV)

This week I have been thinking about the people at Noonday who remind me that even in a world that feels heavy and dark, there is so much to be thankful for. I’ll share more about them below. But here, in this space of reflection, I’m holding both things at once: the ache that tells the truth, and the hope that refuses to be extinguished. The sadness of the world we live in, and the certainty that light is coming.

Read the rest of the newsletter here.