God
is preparing The Way. God is an active God who loves and wants to be loved. God
is a God who is near and amongst us. Being made in God’s image, God finds favor
with us. And as the first Christians, often called the followers of “The Way,”
glorified God through living their lives like Christ, how will we glorify God
today? As God prepared the way for Jesus to enter into this world, and as we
anticipate this birth, may you prepare the way for others to experience Christ
and his love for them this Christmas season. During Advent this year, our theme
invites us to dwell deeply in the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke. You
are invited to spend the season savoring the stories and passages from this
part of the Bible. Our weekly themes are:
Nov.
29th – Preparing the Way: God is Near (Luke 1:1-25)
Dec.
6th – Preparing the Way: God is Among Us (Luke 1:26-38)
Dec.
13th – Preparing the Way: God Shows Us His Favor (Luke 1:39-59)
Dec.
20th – Preparing the Way: God is Glorified (Luke 2:1-20)
This week, we explore the theme of how Advent cultivates the difficult discipline of waiting. But also how that waiting and hope find fulfillment with God draws near.
The secret of waiting is the faith
that the seed has been planted, that something has begun. Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment,
in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want
to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment,
who believes that this moment is the moment...
Impatient
people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and
there-fore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare
to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present
and wait there. Waiting, then, is not passive. It
involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is within
her...
The whole meaning of Christian
community lies in offering a space in which we wait for that which we have already
seen. Christian community is the place where
we keep the flame alive among us and take it seriously, so that it can grow and
become stronger in us. In this way we can live with courage, trusting that
there is a spiritual power in us that allows us to live in this world without
being seduced constantly by despair, lostness, and darkness. That is how we
dare to say that God is love even when we see hatred all around us. That is why
we can claim that God is a God of life even when we see death and destruction
and agony all around us. We say it together. We affirm it in one another.
Waiting together, nurturing what has already begun, expecting its
fulfillment--that is the meaning of marriage, friendship, community, and the
Christian life.
-Excerpted
from "Waiting for God," Henri Nouwen. Watch for the Light: Readings
for Advent and Christmas.