Sunday-Is. 12 replaces the psalm this week. It is a song for the season. What are your favorite songs, secular or religious. Favorite Advent song? What are your favorite Christmas songs?
Monday-"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. .. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." Howard Zinn
Tuesday-Psalms are a primary way we speak to God. We take all that we are, we fear and we rejoice in directly to God. We pray psalms that we might better know God and ourselves, and we take that knowing to God in prayer.Psalms are equally a primary way God speaks to us. Witness how they are most often quoted in the New Testament. Psalms provide a way for God to shape my religious life into something bigger than my own experience. Psalms bind me to the whole company of Saints, past and present. Which is to say, when we pray psalms we “catch” God speaking to us as we speak to God. If we attend well, we recognize truth that moves us beyond our own self-conscious concerns and transports us into the concerns of the ages. Diane Jacobsen
Wednesday-"Wisdom and love help us to discern between what is life-giving and what is destructive and call us to infuse our ethical and moral living with the vision of divine love and beauty, to know these actions in the world not as dry and rote ways of being good for the sake of avoiding punishment, but ways of cooperating with wisdom and love to bring life more fully to the earth and to our communities."--- Christine Valters Paintner
Thursday-Compassion is about the very innards of our being flowing with compassion. It is about being moved in our guts. This is how Jesus is described in the Gospel of St. Luke when he sees a mother who has lost her only son. She is a widow and is now following the body of her son for burial in the funeral procession. When Jesus sees her, he has "compassion for her" (Luke 7:13). The Greek verb used is splagchnizomai, the same word that is translated elsewhere as "bowels of compassion" (1 John 3:17, KJV).John Philip Newell
Friday-Chesterton points toward the consciousness within the church, historically at least, of a life that does not depend ultimately upon its skill, its wits and wiles, or even its wisdom (or, as some these days might put it, its executive competence, technical expertise, strategic planning and marketing ability). Neither does the church depend ultimately upon its own faithfulness, theological or moral. The church's life depends upon the power and faithfulness of God to raise the Body of Christ from every death. Our life as church is a continuing participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have a God who knows the way out of the grave.Michael Jinkins
Saturday-What is it about waiting that we find so disagreeable? Is it that we are made to feel insignificant? Is it the slow tick of the clock, or all of the undone tasks? Advent is an unpopular part of the church year as it has waiting as its focus.What should we do with spiritual waiting?
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