This year we have a special opportunity as we are preparing for advent to start.This year we have an extra week after Thanksgiving to allow ourselves to, in a sense, prepare for our preparations. To prepare and get our heart ready and open to grow.
Now if your asking yourself..."what is advent?" we will talk about that also.
Advent is a a time of reconnection and heart preparations for the birth of Jesus. Remember John 1:5 (KJV) "The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it", in John, he writes about this darkness, in Isaiah he also speaks about a darkness, this darkness is the same darkness that dwells within the depths of the human heart. Do we understand what we are preparing for during this season?
It was dark time when Jesus stepped into this world, but it was the perfect time! As we come around each year and begin the calendar year again the true time of renewal is not New Years, but Christmas. There's a lot of darkness in this world and sometimes it feels as if it gets darker and darker and more powerful and that could be true of this world.
It's interesting to see the development of Christmas movies over the past twenty years and the continual need to come back to the loss of the Christmas spirit. There's this profound emphasis of the dwindling of the Spirit of Christmas, like our hearts are lacking more every year of this Spirit of Christmas that for at least one day brings all mankind into a form of unity, but that seems to be breaking down. Like the movies imply, perhaps it is the consumerism, the want and greed for stuff that will most literally trample others down in the process.
Advent is a time, that even the church has begun to forget, that allows us to slow life down and re-focus so we can re-connect with ourselves and examine our own hearts. If we want the darkness to be removed, we must first recognize it. Darkness is tricky that way.
I know too often enough that the deadness of the darkness in our hearts will hide itself so well that we can fool ourselves to not realize how dry and wasted our spirits are. One of the reasons I attempt to attend one conference each year is so that I can immerse myself for a few days and see the darkness emerge, so that I might recognize truthfully the deadness dwelling within. Only the light can reveal that darkness.
Each Sunday of advent we light a candle of the wreath as a symbol of the light igniting inside of us and the darkness being overtaken, its a powerful time.
Don't worry about the "right way", just begin the journey, do some research online, pick up a book of advent readings or download possibly for free on your mobile device or Kindle from Amazon.
I can't vouch for everything on this site, but I have found a few articles of worth:
http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/Advent/index.html
