Dear Friends,
A friend and her family are planning for Christmas for the first time in a new home in a new town. She described feeling unsettled despite trying to continue Advent and Christmas traditions from the past. She added that their children wished they could return to the place and the home they had left behind. Her experience is probably familiar to all of us at one time or another in our lives.
Advent can offer special meaning for those of us who feel anxious or unsettled. Our Advent lessons from Isaiah speak to those parts of our lives with promises of swords being beaten into plowshares, the wolf dwelling with the lamb, those with feeble knees being made firm, and the people who were walking in darkness seeing a great light.
We couple Isaiah’s words in this season with our own imagining of the story of a family unsettled by a journey. Too late to return to the home they had left behind, they paused out of necessity. And there, at precisely the most unsettled moment, the birth of a child, the child Jesus, brought “tidings of comfort and joy” when most needed.
I hope you will join us throughout this Advent season to be guided to the Savior lying in a manger who is Christ the Lord.
Faithfully,
The Reverend Edward O. Miller, Jr.