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 (Advent Week 1)
|
Hi Friends, Welcome to week one of the Advent Series! I wrote this devotional series specifically 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. We live as though 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 wholeheartedess. 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, I’ll never forget it. I showed up for class in college, slid into my seat, and noticed the girl on my left had a large smudge on her forehead. She was an acquaintance, and in my earnestness to be a “real friend”, I pointed it out. “You have something on your forehead”, I said, gesturing to her as if wiping at my face. “It’s Ash Wednesday,” she said, turning in her seat. Whoops! Neither my husband nor I grew up in churches that followed the church calendar or included liturgy. So...
Hi Friends, Last week we talked about finding every last bit of our ordinary lives in the grand storyline of God. This week, let’s look at how we help one another do just that. When Eugene Peterson counseled pastors on how to help their parishioners find themselves in God’s story, he said, “Listening is the first step. It is the precondition for… making the transition from what a person perceives as alienation and experiences as a jumble of unrelated irrelevancies to a sense of coherence and...
Hi Friends, Sometimes we do this thing when we read the stories of people in the Bible. We wake up early to read Scripture, and we see the epic work of God in and through the lives of men and women. Then we put down the book and head to the kitchen to clean up the sea of Crispix a sleepy kid spilled across the floor. Back to normal life. But I want to alert you to something real happening in your life. As real as the cereal you crushed under foot and now have to find the hand broom to sweep...