Advent is a special time in the Church calendar year.  In anticipation of celebrating Jesus’ birth at Christmas, I wanted to be sure that in our little International Church in Yaounde we lit the advent candles one Sunday a week in the 4 weeks before Christmas.  So, since the last Sunday in November, I’ve been making sure the advent wreath is set up, arranged for different families to do a reading and light the candle each week. 

For the 4th Sunday in advent – just last Sunday – I reminded our family that we need to be sure we arrived early enough to get it set up.  For once, we were all actually ready well ahead of time.  Traffic is pretty congested this time of year on our route from home to church, which meets in the Hilton Hotel downtown.  But we arrived in great time! 

And as we pulled into our parking spot I realized… I’d forgotten to bring the advent wreath!  Ah!  Kicking myself, I thought, “I knew this would happen some time.  NOW what am I going to do?!”  It’s not the end of the world to skip this portion of the service.  But it will feel so incomplete to light 3 candles and forget the 4th. 

So, as I was helping get our church supplies out of the little storage room in the deep recesses of the hotel where guests never go, I passed a counter where several pretty flower arrangements seemed discarded.  I asked a hotel employee, “Are these going to be used?  May I borrow one for just a couple hours?”  He replied that he didn’t care if we never brought the flowers back.

Ok, this will be nice, at least we’ll have a pretty flower arrangement on the front table.  Then as I looked closer, I saw the spongy block that the flowers were suck into, and thought candles could stick in there too.  So I asked the same very kind and helpful hotel employee if there were like 5 candles that I could use.  “Attendez deux minutes” he said, wait 2 minutes.  So I waited.  And soon he emerged from the recesses of the hotel where no guest goes with 5 nice white candles.  After arrangeing them in amongst the flowers, I asked one more thing of him — matches.  And there he came with a small box of Hilton Hotel matches.  And “voila!”  we had a very impromptu advent wreath.

God is good.  He cares even about the little details, like providing an advent wreath for the 4th Sunday — even covering for my absent mindedness.

The service included other last minute improvisation moments but we’re flexible and it all worked out to be a wonderful worshipful service with loads of music.