PASTOR'S PONDERINGS....December 2022.

The Season of Advent starts four weeks before Christmas. This year Advent

starts on Sunday, Nov. 27, and ends on Sunday, Dec. 18. Have you noticed that

Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, is on Saturday this year? So Christmas Day will be on a

Sunday! That’s kind of surprising, but it does happen like that periodically.

As we prepare for the celebration of the Christ child, God born into our

world in the baby Jesus, there may be other surprises for us as well. That’s the way

God is. As hard as we try to plan, predict, strategize, the Holy Spirit of God has a

way of showing up when we least expect it. Maybe your surprise will be a card or

phone call from someone you haven’t even thought about in a long time. Maybe it

will be a tear in your eye as you hear a beautiful song that touches you deeply.

Maybe you will be caught by surprise laughing...at a kitten, one squirrel chasing

another, a child making a snow angel. That’s how God works sometimes.

I invite you to be open to unexpected, even unimaginable surprises this

Advent. Maybe they won’t all be easy to see or accept. But maybe God is just

waiting to surprise you with refreshing springs in the driest of places of your life.

Or maybe you will be caught by surprise when God allows light to break into our

world which so often looks and feels so dark. Perhaps you will be surprised by a

moment of mercy and forgiveness that you didn’t even dare to hope would ever

happen.

I offer you this Advent Prayer written by Professor Thomas Long in his

book of Advent devotions: A Surprising God, cowritten with Donyelle C.

McCray.

O God, you come to us in ways we could never have expected or imagined. Do

not let us become so complacent, so ready to manage the reality of our lives, that

we miss the surprises of grace and redemption that you bring to us. We pray in the

name of Jesus Christ, our Peace. Amen.

A blessed, surprising, joy-filled Christmas to all.

Pastor Geri

 

When we are able to build open spaces in the same way

we have learned to pile on the logs, then we can come to see how it is fuel,

and absence of the fuel together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.

A fire grows simply because the space is there, with openings in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn

can find its way.

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