Isaiah 40:3
A voice of one calling:
"In the desert prepare the way for the LORD;
make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.
The season of Advent is a season of preparation. It includes the four Sundays prior to Christmas so it’s about four weeks long, but it varies in length from year to year. If Christmas day is a Sunday, for example, Advent lasts a full four weeks, ending on Saturday, Christmas Eve. But if Christmas Day falls on a Monday, Advent’s only three weeks long, ending on the fourth Sunday but having no fourth week. This year Advent begins on November 30th and lasts twenty-five days.
Just twenty-five days to:
- complete our Christmas shopping,
- decorate the house and do the baking,
- plan the parties or prepare for the trip back home,
- get exams and papers out of the way,
- lose more weight than can possibly be lost in a 25 day period filled with Christmas parties.
No wonder so many of us will wake up on December 26th to discover that Christmas passed us by again and left us feeling empty and alone. But it isn’t Christmas, it's we who have passed by.
So, beginning on Sunday, November 30th, plan to take a few minutes each day to reflect with me. I’ll post a meditation on an element of Christmas – usually a biblical character, sometimes not – together with a text. The postings will vary in length (probably somewhere between a little too long and a little too short), but I hope each one will open up the story a little for you, or suggest something you hadn’t seen before.
Just twenty-five days:
- to gather up our gratitudes and tie them with a bow,
- to sow the things we hope to reap, and reap the things we sow,
- and tell someone we’re sorry, or let an old hurt go,
- or tell a friend we love her, or one we barely know,
- and find the rushing torrent, and plunge beneath the flow of the love poured out on Bethlehem that day so long ago.
The biblical Christmas story is found in the first three chapters of Matthew and Luke.
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