Christmas is Waiting to be Born

Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes,
And the heart consumes itself, if it would live,
Where little children age before their time,
And life wears down the edges of the mind,
Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day’s life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
Christmas is waiting to be born:
In you, in me, in all of humankind.

~ From Howard Thurman’s The Mood of Christ & Other Celebrations, p. 23

PRAYER

“God of joy and hope, you come to us in Jesus as a king who overturns all our ordinary understandings of power. Your presence is unexpected and unsettling, but we know you, for we have known your healing and provision. Open our hearts to keep on singing and hoping, that we may live snd set without fear.”

~ from Walter Brueggemann’s, Devotions of Advent: Celebrating Abundance, p. 49