Advent and the waiting is actually the place where only after we feel the ache, will we experience the joy!
Hi.
Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
All in faith
Advent and the waiting is actually the place where only after we feel the ache, will we experience the joy!
An angel announces a mystery - prophesying a pregnancy.
Declaring that life will take root in a barren womb.
Speaking fresh hope to an old woman who’s waited a life time for her heart’s desire but has given up.
Feeling forgotten.
Missed.
Overlooked.
Heart sick.
Hopeless.
There is nowhere I could ever go that falls outside of your loving presence, Lord! Even if I tried to run away from You, it would be futile. Whether in my highest, most spiritual moments, or my lowest most shameful ones, You are there with me. When I chase after You like the light and hope of a new day, and when I avoid You, attempting to hide in the deepest dark, You are still with me. Your hands are still on me, guiding me, leading me, holding me, loving me.…
The thing is, what I notice the most - shapes me. Spirit, soul and body all respond to where we focus.
But each year the chasm between her age and abilities expanded. I’m not sure when, but the realization that we had adopted a child with special needs settled in bringing waves of fear, denial and hard questions for God and myself.
Because let's face it... Easter begins with a focus on DEATH. And death doesn't "sell" It's not as sexy as Santa and presents and holiday parties and "White Christmas".
So maybe we can breathe deeply, and being free of the distractions that a secularized distortion of a holy day brings, we can fully submerse ourselves in it. All it's drama. And ugly. And beauty. And mystery. And hope. (the bunny has NO power to compete with this!)
How to live "present". It is to dwell. to remain. to stay in a place or position or state. It's about abiding.
But to abide must start with my thinking and beliefs.
Join me in a series of meditations on John 15:1-16 where jesus gives you and I a beautiful picture which holds the key to this kind of life.
It’s easy for me, (us), to read this and look at those silly, ungrateful, forgetful, greedy, grumbling Israelites and think, “what is WRONG with them??!!”
But the Word is a mirror that shines on my own fickle heart and when I’m willing to gaze into it I see how much I am the same as the grumbling crowd.
Over and over and over. How about 26 times in 26 verses?!
That would be - important.
I’d be paying attention and thinking, He really wants me to get this. This is worth repeating.
It’s enough to make us dizzy, all this turning of shortcomings, around and around in our minds. And perspective is skewed with dizzy, spinning hearts.
But the wisest words for this New Year for me, (maybe you too?), words to stop the drain, the emptying, the dizzy, self-absorbed perspective, are words worth repeating:
“But THIS I call to mind, and THEREFORE I have hope:
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