While We Wait: Mystery

     The incarnation, God coming to us in the flesh as the babe, Jesus Christ, is not always easy for our human minds to understand. Infact, we often get tripped up in the details of how this could happen, which makes over gloss right over why it happened. God came to us in the Christ Child, because there was no other way. God had tried to set us on the right path, redeem us from our sin, by the words of the prophets. By the covenant that we broke time and time again. Now emerged the only way for us to have the path to Salvation - Jesus Christ. The one who would come and show us what it looks like to be in right relationship with our neighbors and God. The one who would give his very life for us on the cross. 

    The mystery of the incarnation may be the how, but it is no mystery why Jesus gave his very life for us. May we claim the greatest gift ever given this day and always. 

While We Wait: Favored

   We often do not realize that we are favored in this life. We look around us, start comparing ourselves to the Jones, and feel like we are being left behind. Like we don't have enough. Like we aren't enough.
   If anyone should feel like they aren't enough it is Mary. Mary was a young woman in a day and age when people who are favored in society were men. Men of power. Men of influence. She also finds status by her husband's good name, and she is not yet married. Yet it is to the lowly of the lowly, a poor woman from a poor unknown village, that God comes and speaks truth into her life, saying that she will carry the savior, the Messiah.
   For Mary, however, this sigh of favor, this promise, wasn't an immediate blessing. She knew that it would cause issues in her family, with her upcoming engagement. She knew that she would become the talk of the town, an unwed woman saying that she was carrying God's child. Yet, she trusted God anyway.
   Sometimes the favor God shows us doesn't feel like a blessing at the time. Sometimes it seems like it is more trouble than it is worth. Yet, God does shine God's face upon us, even if we do not fully recognize it at the time.

While We Wait: Hope

    Hope seems to be in short supply in our world. Or maybe more accurately, a correct view of hope is in short supply. We say that we are hopeless or hopeful, but what do we really mean when we say such things. A hope is not a wish flung out to God in prayer. The Biblical view of hope is believing in things unseen - trusting that God is at work and that God is in control. Is that what we mean when we say that we are hopeful?
    More troubling, what do we mean when we say that a situation is hopeless? That it is beyond God's  control? Or that God is not present with us in the midst of that particular situation?
    Advent is a time for us to renew our Biblical sense of hope - trusting that the promise God made to us in the coming of Jesus Christ is true and central in our lives. May it be so. Amen. and Amen.