I am a singer, songwriter, wife, mother, Jesus follower. I send out a 2-minute read every Tuesday about Jesus and life in God.
The Speed of Man (1/5 Advent)
|
Hi Friends, Welcome to week one of the Advent Series! This year I am writing these Advent devotionals for those overcoming spiritual anxiety. (You can read more on that here if you missed it.) There is healing for us in this Advent story, and it starts at the very beginning. In Luke 1:26-38, we see Mary visited by the Angel Gabriel and given a most shocking message. That she, a virgin, would bear the Son of God. She is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, and it begins: Jesus spends His first 9 months on earth just like you and I did — in the womb. In coming as a baby, Jesus dignified the rhythms and limitations of the human frame. For even the Incarnation happened at the speed of man. If you or I were planning Jesus’ first coming, we would never have tucked Him out of eyesight for the first 9 months. He could have walked in from the wilderness fully grown and hit the ground running. We need Him! There’s so much to do! We would have skipped the small, the growth, the delay. Time is of the essence! We would want to hear Him speak as many anointed words as possible and show us with as many actions as possible the ways of the Kingdom. I mean, those are all really good things, right? But in fully giving Himself to the silence and stillness of the womb, perhaps God spoke His loudest words of all. For in those months of perceived inactivity, He shouts over the normal human rhythms of your life and mine, “It is good!” But this may not have been what you were told. Even in the church, some have been taught to resist normalcy. To fight the boundaries of our human frames. We pretend like we don’t need sleep. Like rest for the mind and body is optional. We glorify burning the candle at both ends. We regard ones who press, press, press as heroes. We make over-work the sign of wholeheartedness. But Jesus did not toil. He did not assign virtue to pressing the normal bounds of the human frame. Jesus fully subjected Himself to the rhythms, needs, and delays of being a man. When we let the weight of super-human living come off our shoulders, we are agreeing with the One who gave us our humanity, it is good. Prayer: –Anna |
Anna Blanc
I am a singer, songwriter, wife, mother, Jesus follower. I send out a 2-minute read every Tuesday about Jesus and life in God.
Hi Friends, For years, I’ve taken the weeks leading up to Christmas to stare into the passages of Scripture about Christ coming as a baby. The birth of Christ is a storyline that’s rich in wonder. We could spend all 365 days of the year focusing on it and not exhaust all there is to see. Last year, I did something different. I wrote an Advent email series specifically for those overcoming spiritual anxiety. Spiritual anxiety? What the heck is that? This is a phrase I’ve been using to describe...
Hi Friends, What defines a life well lived? When you’re young, it’s easy to imagine your life stretching out in front of you like a line on graph paper. It ascends predictably, ending in the upper right hand corner. Success! But life is unpredictable. In some moments, it is chaos. I’ve been reading through the life of Moses in scripture these days. There is no sky-rocketing line of success on the graph of his life. In fact, the highs of miraculous wonders and lows of sin and failure spike and...
Hi Friends, When we were on our “church tour” about a year and a half ago, something stood out to us. With all the different expressions and traditions that have been handed down through different Christian denominations, there are a few practices they hold in common. One of those practices is communion. In some churches you kneel. In others you’re handed the bread. In some places you pass bits of crackers down the aisle. Some churches do it weekly, others less often, but I have yet to see a...