Listening to God Together

TURN ON THE LIGHT!  Advent is the darkest time of the year.   The days are short, the nights are long,   and then there’s stress around the holidays to contend with. If you check the hospitals you can see that this time of year routinely adds to their patient load, even without covid. To add to that, Southern California Edison has decided to turn off our power, sometimes for days at a time.   At the ranch that means we don’t have water, either, because it’s pumped by electricity.  That creates some anxiety.   Some folks, like me, suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Too much gloom outside and I start to internalize the gloom. What’s the solution to all of this anxiety and darkness? TURN ON THE LIGHT! ( I even have a full spectrum light that I use when there are too many dark days) And that’s just what God did at Christmas—  He sent us Jesus, the Light of the World .  He marked the way with a star.  HE TURNED ON THE LIGHT. We see references to Light all through

I’ve been thinking about Mary today.  She was a “little girl” in our present day way of thinking, and yet the moment when the angel appeared to her and she consented to God’s intervention in her life became the watershed of history—the event that changed everything for all us…. forever.  So. Much. Power. Focused on one small life in one quiet moment.  A moment we might never have known about had not the gospel writers chosen to record it. That amazes me. It makes me think of all the still, small moments in my own life when God has broken through my inner storm and whispered, “Peace. Be still, and hear the plans I have for you…” "Mary asserts herself before God saying, 'Here am I.' There is no arrogance, however, but only holy fear and wonder. Mary proceeds - as we must do in life - making her commitment without knowing much about what it will entail or where it will lead. I treasure the story because it forces me to ask: When the mystery of God's love breaks t

I don’t know about you, but I want to be God.  I’ve always wanted to be God, ever since I was a baby.  I want things my way, in my timeframe, with everything just the way I imagined it. And I’m not the first creature to feel that way.  Creatures have been saying that since before the foundations of the World.  One in particular probably comes to mind at this point— The God of This World, The Serpent, the Prowling Lion, old Lucifer himself. I’m not proud to echo this sentiment, but there it is.  If we’re honest, I bet we all do. When I stamped my 2 year old foot and cried in anger, “NO! ME do it!”, that was actually me exercising Fortitude— the dubious gift that God allowed us after the Fall so that we were able to stand up and carry on.  Otherwise, I suppose, Adam would still be lying in a heap at God’s feet, crushed by the weight of his sin. But God made Him able to get up and leave the Garden—and the Tree of Life—behind. The problem with Fortitude is that it makes us believe t

Philippians 2: 1-2  Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, 2 make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Were you around during the Jesus Movement in the 1970’s?   I remember it being so exciting!  To be a Christian was to be a New Creature— and I felt like a new creature.  My eyes were opened to things my parents never knew.   My parents, children of the Depression, had been devastated by their families’ practice of Christian Science.  There was a lot of painful baggage they carried because of it. I’m sure they thought I had lost my mind when I came home to “witness” to them about how they were sinners and needed saving.  In Christian Science there was no such concept as “a sinner”.  You either recited “The Truth” and got well, or you were sick and they shamed you for not believing correctly

We all rebel.   Oh, we cloak it in softer words—  We resist.  We avoid. We individuate. We differentiate.  We refuse.  We run away.  We talk back. We protest. We riot. We don’t believe. What is a two-year old’s favorite word?   NO! During our development as a child we need to define our separateness from our parents.  That’s part of being the individual God made us to be.  But the seed of Sin infiltrates that plan, entangling itself with the God-given design of differentiation and individuation, and begins to twist the strands together until it becomes difficult to see where one leaves off and the next begins. While we are designed to be an individual who becomes one with God and each other, we start into the sketchy realm of sin when that individuation becomes disconnection and aggression.  Unlike the sinless Lamb of God who gave Himself over to sin for us, we talk about our rights and  what we are entitled to .   And in fact, we were created to live forever in a per