The Allure of the New by Lorraie Triggs

For some people, it’s the allure of a new car; for us, it’s the allure of a new coffee machine.

Among our assorted ways to brew coffee, a drip coffee maker is conspicuous in its absence. I didn’t think we needed a new drip coffee maker, until one caught our attention. It “combines the art of hand-brewing with the convenience of automation, so every cup is smooth, rich, and perfectly balanced.” The review promised that this coffee maker simply brews exceptional coffee exactly the way you like it—single brew or batch. Suddenly, I envisioned this coffee maker, in its newest color of chocolate malt, on my kitchen counter, replacing the old coffee maker that was perfectly fine twenty-four hours ago.

The allure of the new is as old as humankind. In the newly fashioned garden, the serpent offered the man and the woman something new, something better, something different from what God had designed for his first image-bearers. And image-bearers ever since have been lured by the same offer of the new, the different, the bigger, the better—only to be caught in an endless, dissatisfying loop we strive to fill with the next new, different, bigger or better things. Just ask the Preacher: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 1:1)

That loop is the God-shaped vacuum often attributed to French philosopher Blaise Pascal. In fact, Pascal described the loop as an infinite abyss that “can only be filled with something that is infinite and unchanging—in other words, God himself. God alone is our true good.” (from Pensées #425)

It is out of his overflowing goodness and lovingkindness that God fills the abyss and breaks the loop with all things new. To his people in exile, under the old covenant, he says, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” (Isaiah 43:18-19)

To those of us who might feel a pull toward that infinite loop of wanting something new, something different, something better, the Apostle Paul reminds us, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come.” (2 Corinthains 5:17) In commenting on this verse, Kent Hughes points out that it’s a “newness that is everlastingly new; because the old is done, the new has come to stay.”

This newness makes ways in the wilderness and rivers in the desert now as well as in the new heavens and earth to come. And makes it just fine that the chocolate malt drip coffee maker—or the next new thing—remains conspicuously absent from my kitchen counter and my life.

Earthly Good of the Heavenly Mind by Wil Triggs

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. Col. 3:2

I wasn’t meant to hear it, but I did. 

“What did you say?” I asked.

They averted their eyes. I had heard them. They were pretty sure that I had, too. What they said was, “They’re so heavenly minded, they’re no earthly good.”

Looking back, I think those men might have been talking about me. You know when people are talking, and then they see you and look away, as if they haven’t been talking?

In my early Christian life, I found myself bringing Jesus or prayer or something I had just read from the Bible into discussions where those critics didn’t think such things belonged. 

There he goes again. He doesn’t know any better; he’s just a kid. He’ll grow out of it.

Around the same time this happened, Mr. Edmonds, the husband of my mom’s friend at work, suddenly collapsed. They thought he would die. My mom became preoccupied with his health. At night, she would call her friend, who wasn’t going into work, to see how he was doing. Even though we did not attend church every week, my mom assured her friend of her prayers and concern.

He ended up living but was confined to a wheelchair. To help them out, my mom drove me over to their house where I would mow their lawn and do whatever else they needed.

I don’t think Mr. Edmonds liked me much at first. Actually, it wasn’t me, but I sensed resentment. He resented that he even had to ask for help, that he could not do what he was asking me to do. I admired the yard and garden equipment in his garage; this was something he had liked doing. He wanted to get up out of his wheelchair and do it himself. We both knew that he could have done the jobs he was giving me faster and better than I ever did. 

Except he could not walk. 

Mine was a different despair. I was tasked with digging out his pachysandra groundcover they had in one of their flowerbeds. The dug-out plants filled trash bags and was heavy work, not difficult, but really getting all the roots out seemed impossible. It just kept coming back. More stubborn than ivy or and dense as the most invasive ornamental grass. No matter how many roots I pulled, there were more roots underground than I could possibly pull or dig out. This was a task that I couldn’t imagine even Mr. Edmonds would have wanted to do himself. But he watched me work from the window.

I remember pulling and digging and pulling and digging at the pachysandra entrenched in the dirt. While I attacked the invader, I wondered about those men’s critique of “religious” people. No earthly good. People just thinking about heaven, about the God those men did not believe. What a waste, I could feel their mocking, their looking down on a youthful curiosity and enthusiasm about faith as some kind of association with inactivity. But I also wanted to think about heaven. I couldn’t help it.

There I was. My hands literally in the earth, doing yard work for a man who could no longer do it himself, worrying about the critique of thinking about heaven as somehow stopping me from earthly good. For Mr. Edmonds, my attempts to clean up his yard was doing earthly good. I was helping him. 

But what I did not appreciate in the moment was that he was also helping me. This was God at work in both of us.

There is always the chance of being so earthly minded that a person might not be any heavenly good. The critique may be valid, or it could be a smokescreen for people who don’t want to think about heaven or anything on earth that is not right in front of them.

Truth be told, the heavenly and the earthly are fused in ways that we can’t see most of the time. But the life, death and resurrection of Jesus demonstrate for us that being heavenly minded can ultimately do the greatest of all earthly good.

Mr. Edmonds was kind to me, making sure I took breaks with lemonade, sweets and fruit. But I could feel his anguish and despair. He wished he could do what he watched me do for him. We became friends. He wrote references for me. Sometimes, he listened to me talk about my faith. He didn’t look down on me because of what I believed. We also talked about books—his interests were quite different from mine. That was okay. We didn’t have to be like one another to listen and respect the other person. 

True good is both earthly and heavenly. It’s pulling weeds for a man who cannot walk. It’s giving hard work to a young man just starting out. You do such things without knowing for sure how it’s going to turn out. And it’s talking and thinking about heaven and its king at the same time as you do such things. By the grace of God, do good, even when you can’t stand up on your own or dig out all the groundcover or stop people speaking ill of you because Jesus is changing you into something new that you or they have never before seen.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. Matthew 6:19-20

Losing My Voice in the New Year

It usually happens this way. Lorraine gets sick and after two or three days, she is well. A couple days after her recovery, I come down with what she had, but instead of three days, recovery seems to take three months for me. Oh well. At least it’s not three years.

This happened during the current sick season. Lorraine felt ill enough to stay home, which for her is like a hundred-year snow event. I started to feel symptoms before she recovered fully. I seemed okay when we went to work this morning. In the staff kitchenette one of my co-workers said I sounded “a little throaty,” but by the time staff meeting rolled around and it was my turn to talk about what I’m working on, sounds came out of my mouth.

I looked up. Everyone was very kind, but I could tell by their expressions what they were thinking. Wil sounds like Linda Blair in The Exorcist minus the cursing.

Every year it seems that at least once, I’m confronted with a pretty horrific literal physical voice.

So, then I go to see our new doctor. The old one retired but before he did so, he was trying to tell us that oranges are bad to eat. Oranges. I grew up in southern California before the locusts of lower cost housing tracts ate up all the orange groves. Back then it was farm country. A peeled orange was nature’s vitamin boost that tasted better than just about anything. Well, ok, not counting See’s candy.

But this new doctor—he’s not anti-orange. In one of my first visits with him, I fumbled through my coat pocket and pulled out a jar of hot fudge sauce. Handing it to him, I explained, “We make this every Christmas and give it away.” He takes it, not quite sure what to say. It’s not a bribe, just a little gift we share with friends. He says thanks in a way that says he doesn’t quite know what to say. But he’s in a hurry. He’s on the clock, time for the next person.

He’s married and he and his wife had their first baby back in the fall. A girl.

Then Lorraine went to see him. She found out he’s Roman Catholic in background but not practicing. They live in Batavia, but maybe they’ll move closer. Maybe he should think about it. He’s examining us, but we are learning about him, too.

So, this last Christmas, on another visit from me, he’s happy to see another jar of hot fudge sauce. He remembers it from the previous Christmas. He tells me the kind of ice cream he has at home that he’s going to put it on tonight and eat it.

It’s Jesus, I want to say. I mean, this good stuff—it’s because of Jesus.

I think about his coming to College Church. Maybe he’ll bring his family. Maybe God will enter the picture.

In my dream, he does come. He waits in line to drop off his daughter in kindergarten. I see him in men’s Bible study at a round table in a room that seems like the Crossings but somehow, it’s the Commons, too. He prays with people. His wife turns out to be even nicer than he. And there they all are in a pew in church. His kids are dedicated. He’s elected to some position at an annual meeting. But then he’s a missionary doctor in a country I don’t know, a place where it’s summer in winter, a place where there isn’t any snow. And then he shows up in the dead of winter to treat someone at a free clinic by the little church I know in Maloyaroslavets, Russia, where we used to volunteer in summer camps with the children, but it’s snowing and so cold that when I’m walking on the path to the apartment where we’re living, my exhaled breath turns to icicles that fall to the ground and shatter on the pavement. I go to see the doctor, and he tells me to drink hot water with lemon and honey. You know how dreams can be.

“Don’t be afraid,” I want to say, when I see a person’s eyes go grey as soon as I start to speak of Jesus. God isn’t going to hurt you. It’s not like that.

Salvation is a jar of chocolate that you can’t buy in a store.

Whatever I dream of for James (the doctor’s first name)—I like to think someday I might call him Jim—is nothing compared to the good that God has in store. I can’t even dream it. But I do have a voice—even a raspy one—that can speak.

But “voice” isn’t only a sound; when it comes to grammar, voice can be active or passive. A seminary-grad friend of mine confessed to me that he never understood this concept. When he would show me something he had written and I told him that he had a lot of passive voice in it, which he always did, he confessed to me that he just could never get “that voice thing.”

With active voice, the subject does the action. Jesus died for my sins. Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus saves.

With passive voice, the subject does not do the action; the action is done to the subject. I am saved by grace. I am given faith to believe. I will be given words to speak when I do not know what to say.

I do manage to squeeze in that Lorraine and I are writing a book, a little Lent book. The doctor confesses that he doesn’t read as much as he should. And then he’s off to something or someone else. Will one of us have to get sick to give him a copy, or can we just show up?

It's not that Jesus needs me to save a person. Thank goodness that’s on him. After all, I am not even the subject of my life. That’s Jesus. He doesn’t need me; I need him. God’s voice speaks into my life. God’s voice speaks meaning and purpose.

“Therefore my people shall know my name. Therefore in that day they shall know that it is I who speak; here I am.”

How beautiful upon the mountains
    are the feet of him who brings good news,
who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness,
    who publishes salvation,
    who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”

Isaiah 52:6-7

Will I find my voice in 2026? Will I sound like Linda Blair, or will I sing like James Taylor or Jamal Sarikoki? God can give me beautiful words. I have only to speak them to those around me.

The voice of your watchmen—they lift up their voice;
    together they sing for joy;
for eye to eye they see
    the return of the Lord to Zion.
Break forth together into singing,
    you waste places of Jerusalem,
for the Lord has comforted his people;
    he has redeemed Jerusalem.
Isaiah 52:8-9

Jesus, this year help my words and my life point people to your words, to your tree, your shepherd, your rescuer, your life, to the Living Word that makes all things new.

Here am I. Send me.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall by Lorraine Triggs

Mirrors—the unhung heroes of interior design. Writing for the “Wirecutter” feature in the New York Times, Ivy Elrod extols the virtues of a well-placed mirror.

“Small spaces, like tight hallways or entries, often lack abundant natural light. In such cases, a well-placed mirror can give the illusion of more space while helping to reflect and disperse what light there is. Hang your mirror on a wall across from a light source (like an adjacent window or lamp), and the reflection will bounce that glow into the rest of your space,” advises Elrod in her article, “You Don’t Need More Space. You Just Need More Mirrors.” (Published December 4, 2025, in the New York Times.)

Elrod consulted several interior designers and architects on their “favorite ways to employ mirrors, particularly when problem-solving dark or tight spaces.”

In his letter to scattered believers, James also referenced the potential effects of a mirror: “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.” (James 1:22-25)

Like a mirror, the Word lights dark spaces—the dark spaces of our souls—and by reflecting the truth of God’s character reveals the nature of our sins. That mirror can indeed be “problem-solving the dark or tight spaces” of our souls, unless we walk away and forget what we saw. God’s Word disperses light so we can see clearly the way he wants us to live—to be “a doer who acts.”

Interior designers, Elrod points out, also use light-reflecting mirrors to give a space a sense of expansiveness. Our God does more than give a sense of light or expansiveness to dark corners; he is the “Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). He is love’s pure light; his very nature is expansive.

In Romans 8:38-39, Paul’s words span extremes to describe God’s nature: “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

True to his expansive nature, God has given us the treasure of the “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” (2 Corinthians 4:4) A “doer who acts” and is not just “a hearer” carries this treasure, ironically, in ordinary jars of clay—perhaps worn, faded and cracked in places—so that his light will shine in the darkest spaces of the darkest places of the world.

No So Amazing People--Magi by Wil Triggs

I’m feeling a little cheated this Christmas season. I didn’t get to dress up like a Bible character and put myself into the Bible story for our Kindergarteners. Our curriculum had us studying the bad prophets and kings. I don’t want to dress up like one of those bad Jahoia-whatevers. Then, suddenly in a nod to Christmas, the lessons shifted to Mary. I guess I could have dressed up like an angel, but Lorraine really wanted to tell the story of Mary. So, it was her turn this year; she didn’t dress up.

There’s something about an old, bearded man in jeans and a sport jacket morphing into a shepherd or an apostle or maybe even a tax collector that is just irresistible to me. And our kids are young enough that when I announce myself as whoever, there is a little part of them that believes it.

Now my head goes to the magi from the east—upper echelon, exotic, other-worldly. They were learned. Sometimes called wise men or kings, they brought gifts and avoided meeting Herod a second time. The Bible doesn’t give details, but traditions have added names and more. I could be one of them, I think; instead my head goes to special guests. I’m the casting agent this time.

Caspar, representing Europe, brought gold; I cast my friend from Ukraine. He has school-aged kids and does ministry in the midst of war, where air raid sirens are a part of daily life. They’ve started rationing electricity in his neighborhood at unpredictable times. He helps with small groups. He teaches workshops to help young people use their minds and imaginations. He has contests for people to write down a story of faith in what seems like an unending war. What a gift of gold he brings.

Melchior, representing Asia, brought frankincense; I cast my friend from Singapore. He too is a pastor and a publisher.  He has a strong ministry to men and helps to call them to great holiness. He also has no pretentions. He is kind and humble and acts sometimes like Obiwankenobi or Yoda. He is funny and heart-felt serious at the same time. His quiet prayer sustains me through years.

Balthazar, representing Africa, brought myrrh; I cast my friend from Nigeria. He’s works for a publisher/printer. The town and church he grew up in were burned to the ground—Boko Haram or the Fulani, I can’t remember which, but they’re both there. He perseveres, and his gentle love and prayers for others always refresh. The publishing goes on as does the church in Nigeria.

So, for next year, it’s not going to be me. I’m inviting my real friends to make their imaginary journeys on camels—clop, clop, clopping their way across oceans and borders toward the Bethlehem of Kindergarten at College Church.

The shepherds saw and heard the angels announce the coming of Jesus, but the magi saw from afar. They saw something in the stars that was significant enough for them to put their lives on hold and take a journey to a foreign land to worship a king they clearly did not know.

Each of us takes that journey only to discover that our homelands are the faraway-from-God places where we bring books of faith to children or bookstores or seminaries or war zones—the Word that is alive is with us.

The faraway wisemen capture imaginations through the ages and we can’t help ourselves. We embellish and create stories. It’s fun. But we also see Jesus in new and different ways when we see him through the eyes of far-off people. Jesus transcends our homes, nations, cultures. He is in but beyond our human foibles, even the ones we make as Christians.

I like to think that the Christians I most admire are the ones not like me, but people far away—in miles or in history—from my own limited experience: my friends from Asia and Europe and Africa. But you know, we are not really so different from one another. We do not define God by our experience. God makes us; he defines us by his everything; he uses us in our own contexts for light-shining where darkness imagines itself ruling for what feels like forever.

Joseph’s shame, the cunning smirk or cynic’s scoff

From the womb to the feeding trough

Or all we know as humanly smart

He dives headlong into the human heart

From the cup of wrath he does not shrink

The filthiest dregs he dares all to drink.

The servant Wise-Man-Maker journeys on

From darkest night to pearlescent dawn

Hammered to the skull-place of no recall,

The royal robes of heaven, he surrenders all.

He gives up life and gives more than anyone can

Dawn comes to the sleeping land of woman and of man.

Our tattered gifts we journal, we kneel, we bring

From Joseph’s tomb he lifts his baton that we might sing.

A Man Walks into a Bar on Christmas Eve by Lorraine Triggs

My father spent one Christmas Eve at a bar.

I didn’t know that till years after his death and I was home for Christmas break. I learned it from Mr. K, who was doing some interior house painting for my mom. I stuck my head into the room to say hi.

“You know, your dad was one of the few people who didn’t give up on me,” Mr. K—call me Roy, now—said a bit wistfully. “Did you know that he sat with me in a bar one Christmas Eve so I wouldn’t go home drunk? I was ready to call it quits, but your dad didn’t let me. He really loved the Lord.”

That I knew. But I didn’t know the bar story, even though I remembered that Christmas Eve. My sibs and I complained about my father’s absence and about waiting forever to begin our Christmas Eve traditions. I also remember that the phone rang a lot, and after every call, my mom assured us that Daddy would be home soon. So be patient. Oh, of course, we were’nt.

Grace and truth walked into that bar oh so many years ago when my father was both to Roy. The truth was clear: You don’t sit in a bar and get drunk on Christmas Eve. The grace evident in cup after cup of coffee poured, every phone call after phone call to my mom so she was in the loop and every hug after hug he gave to his not quite so grace-filled daughters who pounced on him the moment he came home.

How many of us might have been Roy, sitting in a bar—maybe not on Christmas Eve—but still in need of the grace and truth that walked into the world that first Christmas.

The truth was (and still is) clear: humans needed to be saved from their sin. Grace, cloaked in human form as it was, may not have been as obvious nestled among the hay and animals had it not been for excited shepherds who came looking for the Savior that had been born. Some thirty years later, John the Baptist recognized grace and truth in human form and proclaimed, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).

In the lyrical language of Philippians 2:6-11, it’s easy for me to miss just how far down, down, down Jesus stooped to be born in the likeness of men. Instead of grasping his equality with God, he picked up a towel and basin and washed dusty feet. Instead of rejecting the cup of suffering, Jesus submitted to the Father’s will, “to the point of death, even death on a cross” (2:8), because that was what he was born to do as the One full of grace and truth.

I have never sat in a bar on Christmas Eve. The pious part of me wants to say, “and I never will.” But with my father’s legacy, I hear a smiling grace and truth say, “Oh, you never know the places you’ll go with us.”  

Not So Amazing People--Innkeepers by Wil Triggs

Growing up, motels were magical places for me. We didn’t have a lot of money, so when one of my sisters and her family moved to Connecticut, we all went into deep mourning. We talked on the phone once a month because of the expense and sent handwritten letters. When summer came, we drove across the country, from southern California all the way to New England. Most nights we stayed in motels and ate in restaurants—two things we almost never did otherwise. Adventure. One week to get there, two weeks there, and one week to get back home.

We had AAA maps guiding us; they suggested possible places to stay along the way. Often we didn’t use their suggestions, choosing instead to find something a little more budget friendly. Sometimes there was a pool in the parking lot. I begged to put coins into the magic fingers machine that made a bed vibrate for ten minutes if we were lucky enough to get a room that had one. I could watch television from bed. The rooms were clean with ready-made beds that we didn’t have to re-make in the morning when we left. The innkeepers were always nice. Sometimes I got a free bottle of Coke and in the morning before we left, those who drove got free coffee.

The worst time was when we would hit a town where we had planned to stay and the rooms in the motels were all taken. The neon signs could say “vacancy,” “no vacancy,” and sometimes just a simple “no.” We sometimes had to keep driving longer than we wanted and pay more than we planned, but eventually we always managed to find a place to stay.

Finding a place to stay whispers thoughts of Christmas. In the story of Christmas, there’s Mary, Joseph and Jesus. All others fade into the background. Sure, other people are there, but their significance dulls in comparison to the Incarnation.

The innkeeper. The shepherds. The wise men from the east. They all factor into the story and are memorable in their own not-so-amazing ways.

Actually, the innkeeper doesn’t show up in the biblical story. He’s just implied in a reference to Mary and Joseph being turned away from shelter. Luke 2:7 ends with “because there was no place for them in the inn.” Somebody had to give them the “no vacancy” message. In those days they did not have little neon signs to inform weary travelers.

Maybe the thought of a mama giving birth in an inn as public as that was more than the innkeeper could handle, or maybe there were just too many people. Or, if it was a distant cousin who turned them away, well, that adds a whole other wrinkle. Rooms for people were on upper floors, whereas animals were relegated to the ground floor. Whatever happened, a person turned them away. And there’s always the traditional cave or barn-like structure where we place our Nativity figures.

Even from the very beginning, Jesus had no home. Bethlehem was an ancestral “home,” but they were just there for the census. And this baby took his first breaths in the manger, not a family home or a room for special guests. Welcome to the world, Jesus, the one where “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Matt. 8:20)

When the baby grows up, he tells a story that features another innkeeper.

This innkeeper opens his door to a hated class of man who brings with him an injured man he has rescued.

The hated rescuer says to him, “Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.” (Luke 10:35b)

The innkeeper takes the wounded man under his wing, into his inn. Well, Jesus doesn’t really that say as he finishes the story, but he instructs the listeners who first heard him tell it, “You go, and do likewise.”

For the most part, our lives are not lived out in hotels and restaurants. Real life is ordinary life, whatever that might mean for each of us. Eventually vacations end; we go home, make our beds, cook our meals, live our lives.

The events of Christmas traditions are not the real Christmas—much like creches on display showing baby, mother, father, animals, magi, shepherds and angels all arranged around the baby Jesus to tell the story. Our houses and traditions do not hold him. They cannot hold him.  We cannot contain him.

But he can hold us. Jesus can and does hold us. There is room for us in his inn, and he does not turn us away. The vacancy sign is in us until we pull off the road, and he comes to inhabit every room, every corner—binding wounds, offering food and drink and care, serving and loving lost people like you and me.

He only says to us quite simply and wondrously, “You go, and do likewise.” 

Avent Cloaked in Mystery by Lorraine Triggs

“Do you know what the five most sinful cities are in the U.S.?” Wil asked me the other day.

“New York? Chicago? LA?” For sure those were the top three.

Well, one out of three isn’t bad. According to the article Wil read in the Christian Post, the five most sinful cities in America are:

Number 5: Atlanta

Number 4: Philadelphia

Number 3: Los Angeles

Number 2: Houston

Number 1: the original Sin City—Las Vegas

Chicago and New York City didn’t even make the top ten according to the WalletHub’s Vice Index study the Christian Post article cited. The study’s baseline for sinful behavior was anger and hatred, jealousy, excesses and vices, greed and lust—the Seven Deadly Sins.

As part of its study, WalletHub pondered, “What leads many of us to partake in sinful behavior may seem like a mystery, especially when those behaviors become common in our daily lives.”  

If sinful behavior is a mystery, then God’s Word has already revealed whodunit and the motive for our bent to sinning. The Apostle Paul explained it in Romans 5:12, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” Or as the New England Primer put it, A is for Adam as in “In Adam’s Fall We Sinned All.”

Sin and Advent aren’t incompatible.

Advent is also a mystery, a mystery wrapped in promise—a mystery first given to “A is for Adam” et al; then whispered to the prophets that a virgin would conceive a son whose name would be Immanuel, that an insignificant town would bring forth the one to be ruler in Israel, and that people living in the most sinful cities in the world would see a great light.

Advent is mystery wrapped in the Son’s name, Immanuel—God with us—and revealed when the Word, who was with God and was God, became flesh and dwelt among us, which remains a wondrous mystery to me.

If in “Adam’s Fall We Sinned All”, then in Jesus how “much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.” (Romans 5:17)

To those who sit in deep darkness in the most sinful places in the world, to those who sit in the murky shadows of sin and to those who don’t think they are sitting in darkness at all, Advent is gift-wrapped in life and light—there for us to open, to receive, to believe and become sons and daughters of God.

As we walk through Advent this month, let’s ponder and treasure in our hearts this gift from “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
risen with healing in his wings.
Mild he lays his glory by,
born that we no more may die,
born to raise us from the earth,
born to give us second birth.