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 last week’s Monday devotional,
commented: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.
What a fantastic way of looking at things! Thank you so much for sharing, Josh! Josh regularly explores the theme of finding God in unexpected places in his newsletter, The Transparent Room. Check it out!
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…
does my Creator have a pulse? does it quicken with mine? when I hold the light the offering the life the grace in my hand, does He smile, knowing that I feel a breath of what He feels holding me?
The Pilgrim is not obliged to hold us. It is His pleasure, His joy.Â
We feel joy because it was among the Firstborn of us all. Joy is not new; it is ancient, and wise. Creator-God felt it first, and it echoed into each of us. It was Possible, and it became Real.Â
Advent teaches us that it was the Pilgrim’s joy to become like us, to take on flesh and feet and feeling, to walk among His people and live a life, even unto pain and death. It was His joy to step away from the vastness of the cosmos into the tiny world of a womb. And it is His joy to open His arms to us, to hold us when nothing else will, to whisper the Story into our ears to remind us.Â
It is His joy. It is what He longs to do.Â
It was Mary’s joy to hold her baby son in her arms, to rock Him gently, sing sweet songs, let Him feel her breath rise and fall. It was her joy to hold the mystery of His very existence in her heart, to hold the truth and the wild and the dangerous all in her tiny human hands.Â
And as she held Him, He holds us all.
Thank you for reading!
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May God bless us and give us reason to smile always.
I was just about to get my day started, when your post landed in my inbox. Thanks so much for sharing the comment as well as part of your devotional. It made me stop in my tracks, exhale and ponder. I think about microjoys a lot - the little things that are woven throughout the day, that make us smile, that give a reason for a small thank you. I love, how you are connecting it back to the Creator for me.