A Blessed Advent to all!
For the entire season of Advent, I’ll be posting entries from my original Advent devotional ebook, Pilgrim God, every week.
Thank you for joining us!
Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
On our discussion last week, about the tiny, inconsequential places where we find God’s grace,
wrote:This question makes me think of the song "Long Time Girl Gone By," written by Rodney Crowell and Mary Karr and sung by Emmylou Harris, one verse in particular:
The trees look just as pretty when they're bare
Black branches hieroglyphic in the air
The leaves they left are rotted into lace
It's all grace
I love the transitions between seasons, where we see cycles of life and rebirth. This period is particularly beautiful, when I see the fallen leaves, which are preparing the yard for an explosion of new life in the Spring.
Loved this, Danny, both the sentiment and the song recommendation! Danny is an English professor who writes a newsletter here on Substack called Untaking. Check it out for more of his wise musings about art and media!
If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
we were made for patterns and rhythms and the journey to find them is worth every step; what path is this I tread today? what God-of-All-Seasons formed this road today? what otherplace will my feet find today?
The human animal craves habit, and tradition, and ritual. We like forecasts and predictions. When it comes to fate, we prefer not to be surprised.
When Jesus was born, He was born into a time and a place and a people, and they had traditions, too. He was raised on ritual and habit. He celebrated holy days with his family, and He observed days of holy grief, and He prayed and blessed in the way He was taught--and yet, He was still Pilgrim God who made the sun and moon and stars, the seasons and the storms.
And in this way, He blessed our habits, and our rituals, and our traditions. Even the little ones.
The closer they draw us to Himself and to each other, the more blessed, the more powerful. Even the simple things. Even the unseen, oft-overlooked. The little daily gifts we give, and receive. The food we place on the table. The way we rise, and the way we rest. The time spent in the solitude of the car, the bus, the train. The phone calls we make, the words we send, the time spent together, and apart.Â
As we walk the path of life, knocked about by surprises and changes, illness and conflict, news and no-news and overwhelm, our Pilgrim God walks with us, and blesses the little rituals that remind us to look upon His face.
Thank you for reading!
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Love this! I was telling my kids that everything in creation has a string. Just like woody from toy story, you can pull a string and a pre-programmed phrase will come out. What do the trees say when you pull their string? God designed them to speak about his character, his qualities, his creativity. Dirt speaks, pull its string. Birds, grass, stars, currents in the oceans, they all are telling you about their creator. The fun part is discovering Jesus in creations classroom. Stare at the familiar things long enough until they become unfamiliar again. Maybe the reason we don’t see His divine nature and power is because we stay inside for the majority of our day.
That was most unexpected and very touching. So kind of you.