Advent Thoughts

This year I’ve been celebrating Advent, and I’ve had a hand in bringing it into the services at my church.  I have enjoyed each of the Sundays very much.   I’ve also enjoyed using “The Greatest Gift” by Ann Voskamp.  She is a wonderful writer; her style is so poetic.  She creates some beautiful word pictures. 

I thought I’d share a few of the passages I’ve read from Voskamp and others.  Enjoy!

Hope is not a passive reliance upon God.  Hope is a human act of commitment to and investment in the future.  Hope is an act of human courage that refuses to cherish the present too much or be reduced to despair by present circumstances.  Hope is the capacity to relinquish the present for the sake of what is imagined to be a reachable future.  In the end, hope is a practice that bets on a vision of the future that is judged to be well beyond present circumstance, even if one does not know how to get from here to there.  (Walter Brueggemann)

It’s the whole of humanity who live fixated on facades, blinded to the realest real.  The shiny shell of things can bind you and blind you.  It’s a veiled God who elevates the veiled things; the heart, the interior, the soul.  And it’s a temporal world that elevates the foil and the plastic, the status and the skills, the physical and the tangible—all this concrete mirage.  Humanity obsesses with vapors, not eternity.

The reality is, you can lose your life, your joy if you are beguiled by the world’s rind and blind to its inner reality.  The endless bombardment of ads, gloss, Photoshop—it’s like full-immersion sight lessons, schooling us to have eyes for everything unimportant and unreal.  From Hollywood to Pinterest, the media of this world aggressively schools your soul to see the exact opposite of the way God sees. 

People aren’t bodies; they are hearts.  We could train our eyes to turn everything inside out.

“Why should the eye be so lazy?  Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see,” writes G.K. Chesterton.  Let us exercise the eye until it sees through the fat of things, down to the eternal of things.  Let us exercise the eye by walking with Christ.

There is this call for every Christian to answer His calling to be an ocular surgeon.  Our seeing must cut through surfaces and down to souls.

You could close your eyes and ask it, see it…

Is my life about the heart of things?  Is my Christmas?  Am I deeply absorbed in Him and the heart of things?  Or is my life a shallow absorption with surfaces? (Ann Voskamp)

O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things.  The world has been too much with me.  Thou hast been here and I knew it not.  I have been blind to Thy presence.  Open my eyes tht I may behold Thee in and around me.  For Christ’s sake, Amen.  (A.W. Tozer)