Prayer is not the prelude to the work. It is the work. I think Henri Nouwen says it best:

“Prayer requires that we stand in God’s presence with open hands, naked and vulnerable, proclaiming to ourselves and to others that without God we can do nothing. This is difficult in a climate where the predominant counsel is ‘Do your best and God will do the rest.’ When life is divided into ‘our best’ and ‘God’s rest,’ we have turned prayer into a last resort to be used only when all our resources are depleted. Then even the Lord has become the victim of our impatience. Discipleship does not mean to use God when we can no longer function ourselves. On the contrary, it means to recognize that we can do nothing at all, but that God can do everything through us. As disciples, we find not some but all of our strength, hope, courage, and confidence in God. Therefore, prayer must be our first concern.

Allow God to do something through you today.  

It might be an act of charity for someone in need, a visit to someone who is lonely. Or it might be a willingness to forgive an injury or to accept forgiveness. It might even be something God wants you to do for yourself, like accept the rest God is offering to you. 

Whatever God accomplishes through you, give heartfelt thanks” (Henri Nouwen).

“Holy Spirit, Spirit of the Living God,
You breathe in us
on all that is inadequate and fragile,
You make living water spring even
from our hurts themselves.
And through you, the valley of tears
becomes a place of wellsprings.
So, in an inner life with neither beginning nor end,
your continual presence makes new freshness break through. Amen”
(Brother Roger of Taize).

The Psalmist declares that God keeps a record of every tear you shed. He collects those tears in a bottle. God isn’t a stranger to your sorrow or taken aback by your tears.

He above all knows what great sorrow is. God in Jesus was the Man of Sorrows acquainted with grief. God knows.

All of us will at one time or another walk through that dreaded Valley of the Shadow of Death, either for ourselves or for a loved one. It will feel like the end of all our hopes and dreams. You will feel like you can never feel happiness or joy or anything else besides sadness.

But God walks with His children even in the deepest darkest valleys. Even there, He is with you. He will be with you from beginning to end and beyond.

Emmanuel means that God is with us. Always.

I’ve fallen in love with a worship song recently. I love that it is taken almost verbatim out of Revelation 5. I also love that it has the call and response very much like a liturgy. I first heard it when I was live-streaming a funeral for two of my friends’ infant son and the words haunted me then as they do now.

The song by Andrew Peterson is full of hope and promise, both of which we all need, and seems fitting in this Advent season of waiting.

“Do you feel the world is broken? (We do)
Do you feel the shadows deepen? (We do)
But do you know that all the dark won’t stop the light from getting through? (We do)
Do you wish that you could see it all made new? (We do)

Is all creation groaning? (It is)
Is a new creation coming? (It is)
Is the glory of the Lord to be the light within our midst? (It is)
Is it good that we remind ourselves of this? (It is)

Is anyone worthy? Is anyone whole?
Is anyone able to break the seal and open the scroll?
The Lion of Judah who conquered the grave
He is David’s root and the Lamb who died to ransom the slave

Is He worthy? Is He worthy?
Of all blessing and honor and glory
Is He worthy of this?
He is

Does the Father truly love us? (He does)
Does the Spirit move among us? (He does)
And does Jesus, our Messiah hold forever those He loves? (He does)
Does our God intend to dwell again with us? (He does)

Is anyone worthy? Is anyone whole?
Is anyone able to break the seal and open the scroll?
The Lion of Judah who conquered the grave
He is David’s root and the Lamb who died to ransom the slave

From every people and tribe
Every nation and tongue
He has made us a kingdom and priests to God
To reign with the Son

Is He worthy? Is He worthy?
Of all blessing and honor and glory
Is He worthy? Is He worthy?
Is He worthy of this?
He is!
Is He worthy? Is He worthy?
He is!
He is!”

I think for me sometimes I can take in the words to a hymn or chorus or passage of Scripture so often that it becomes rote and loses its meaning for me.

Every now and then, it helps to have a different arrangement or translation to bring out the truth of the text.

In this case, it’s a very familiar passage from John 1 that is very relevant to the Christmas season. I love the way the Message makes it come alive in a fresh new way:

“The Life-Light was the real thing:
    Every person entering Life
    he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
    the world was there through him,
    and yet the world didn’t even notice.
He came to his own people,
    but they didn’t want him.
But whoever did want him,
    who believed he was who he claimed
    and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
    their child-of-God selves.
These are the God-begotten,
    not blood-begotten,
    not flesh-begotten,
    not sex-begotten.

The Word became flesh and blood,
    and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
    the one-of-a-kind glory,
    like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
    true from start to finish” (John 1:9-14, The Message).

“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes – and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas).

Jesus didn’t come all the way to earth merely to tell us to be nicer to each other.

He didn’t travel the cosmos only to tell us to be more tolerant and accepting.

He came to set us free.

If Jesus was only a good teacher and a moral human being, then His death was pointless and we are all still dead in our sins, without hope, and to be pitied above all others.

But Jesus was (and is) God in the flesh who took on our humanity, bore our sins, and gave us His perfection that we who were dead might live.

Advent is the anticipation of all that. Advent is the eager awaiting of the fulfillment of all of God’s promises in Jesus.

We wait, but we wait with hope and certainty. Even so, come Lord Jesus.

First of all, I miss Rich Mullins. I miss his unique voice set in the midst of a Christian music industry where there is a lot of sameness. What he says here is spot on.

I still believe that Church isn’t a place you go on Sunday. It’s not a brick and mortar building. It’s God made visible, made up of living stones like you and me. It’s the people of God doing the work of God in the power of God for the glory of God.

But even so, I don’t do Sunday church services because I’ve got it all together. At least that’s not the way it should be. I may act all high and mighty and superior on Sunday because I show up, but if I’m honest, I know I need help. I know I need other believers to hold me accountable and to encourage me and to challenge me out of my comfort zone.

If I really had my life together, I might as well stay home. But I don’t. So I heed the verse from Hebrews about not neglecting the gathering together of the saints because we need each other. We’re stronger together than we are apart.

That’s why I go to church.

For real, though. Some of us need our spicy chicken sammiches.

I can’t guarantee that what follows isn’t a repeat of something I’ve posted before, but if so, it’s worth reading again.

“Lord Jesus, Master of both the light and the darkness, send your Holy Spirit upon our preparations for Christmas. We who have so much to do seek quiet spaces to hear your voice each day. We who are anxious over many things look forward to your coming among us. We who are blessed in so many ways long for the complete joy of your kingdom. We whose hearts are heavy seek the joy of your presence. We are your people, walking in darkness, yet seeking the light. To you we say, ‘Come Lord Jesus!'” (Henri Nouwen).

As I am learning this Advent season, this is a time to celebrate the Once and Future King. It is a time not only for looking back in fondness to the Christ child in the manger but for looking forward in faith to the returning and conquering Messiah.

May we not forget the real reason for the season, the joy that so often gets lost and buried beneath all the activities and events and mad holiday rush. May we all make room and time to reflect that the infinite God became small and helpless so that we could become sons and daughters of God.

I stumbled across these words while looking over my Facebook memories. I can think of absolutely nothing to add.

“IT WAS THOUSANDS of years ago and thousands of miles away, but it is a visit that for all our madness and cynicism and indifference and despair we have never quite forgotten. The oxen in their stalls. The smell of hay. The shepherds standing around. That child and that place are somehow the closest of all close encounters, the one we are closest to, the one that brings us closest to something that cannot be told in any other way. This story that faith tells in the fairytale language of faith is not just that God is, which God knows is a lot to swallow in itself much of the time, but that God comes. Comes here. ‘In great humility.’ There is nothing much humbler than being born: naked, totally helpless, not much bigger than a loaf of bread. But with righteousness and faithfulness the girdle of his loins. And to us came. For us came. Is it true—not just the way fairytales are true but as the truest of all truths? Almighty God, are you true?

When you are standing up to your neck in darkness, how do you say yes to that question? You say yes, I suppose, the only way faith can ever say it if it is honest with itself. You say yes with your fingers crossed. You say it with your heart in your mouth. Maybe that way we can say yes. He visited us.

The world has never been quite the same since. It is still a very dark world, in some ways darker than ever before, but the darkness is different because he keeps getting born into it. The threat of holocaust. The threat of poisoning the earth and sea and air. The threat of our own deaths. The broken marriage. The child in pain. The lost chance. Anyone who has ever known him has known him perhaps better in the dark than anywhere else because it is in the dark where he seems to visit most often” (Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry).

“We often pray to be delivered from calamities; we even trust that we shall be; but we do not pray to be made what we should be, in the very presence of the calamities; to live amid them, as long as they last, in the consciousness that we are, held and sheltered by the Lord, and can therefore remain in the midst of them, so long as they continue, without any hurt.

For forty days and nights, the Saviour was kept in the presence of Satan in the wilderness, and that, under circumstances of special trial, His human nature being weakened by want of food and rest. The furnace was heated seven times more than it was wont to be heated, but the three Hebrew children were kept a season amid its flames as calm and composed in the presence of the tyrant’s last appliances of torture, as they were in the presence of himself before their time of deliverance came. And the livelong night did Daniel sit among the lions, and when he was taken up out of the den, ‘no manner of hurt was found upon him, because he believed in his God.’

They dwelt in the presence of the enemy, because they dwelt in the presence of God” (Streams in the Desert).

Sometimes, God heals His children, but sometimes God allows His children to suffer so that they may know the special sweetness of the presence of God in those dark days.

Sometimes, God delivers us from trials, but mostly He walks with us through those trials so that we may know how much His strength is perfected in the middle of our weakness.

God never promised us a way out of tribulations and hardships, but He did promise a way through. He promised to be near to the broken-hearted and crushed in spirit. He promised to be with us and never leave us or forsake us, even in the worst of circumstances.