November 16 Greetings

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Dear Ones,

While working on last Sunday’s sermon, I ran across this quote from Madeleine L’Engle:

“I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.”

This goes along with the idea that God doesn’t stop bad things from happening. That wasn’t the promise…the promise is that God is with us, always. As the days shorten and the nights grow longer, we are quickly approaching the end of the year. It has been a long year, full of frustration and waiting. Although it is the beginning of the new church year, Advent is also a season of waiting. Waiting for the Christ Child to come; waiting for the promised light to enter the world.

I think that these 18 months of waiting through the pandemic have made us forget about some of the more positive aspects of waiting. The four weeks of Advent give us time to build anticipation for the coming Christ: Emmanuel, God with us. The longer nights give us time to meditate about what the arrival of this child really means for us. It was God’s way of showing us just how much we are loved. God’s own son came to us as a tiny infant, as human as one gets. Not into a wealthy family of privilege and abundance, but to a young girl and her betrothed in a time of upheaval among the Hebrew people. Christ came as the one to show us how to love each other, how to walk humbly and to seek justice.

We are a culture that is not very good with delayed gratification. We are used to things happening quickly, and we are used to getting what we want when we want it. We have a couple of weeks before Advent begins, and we will celebrate Thanksgiving next Thursday. What are you thankful for? What blessings have you experienced this year, and what makes you filled with gratitude for the God who has created everything? We are all connected: God created all things and proclaimed them ‘very good’.

Take some time in the coming weeks to reach out to someone you haven’t seen or talked to in a while. Be reminded of how rich and satisfying those relationships are, and how easy it is to let them slip from our minds in the busyness of our everyday lives.

We are connected to the earth and all of creation…spend some time outside, breathe deeply and feel the fallen leaves crunch under your feet. Take a walk at night and watch the stars appear in all their heavenly brilliance. On a particularly clear night when the moon is waning, I can see the Milky Way from my house in Prescott Valley.